Civil Disobedience

I'm to the part in the bio of Thoreau by Walls where he spends some time in the clink. Jailer offered to pay his back taxes, but he refused. Scholars speculate that it was his aunt Marie. He didn't spend much time there, and came out to attend a huckleberry party. I have to reread and reacquaint myself with the essay, but I've been asking myself what is worth withholding money from the government in form of protest. Thoreau was protesting the Mexican-American War I think, but honestly it's not fully clear. He could also protest slavery. 

For me, the loss of reproductive right in women is something. The tardy prosecution of Trump is another. He should never have gotten as far as he got, and he should already be off ballots, and unable to run for president. The idea that his prosecution for crimes is political is hooey. The lack of effort to curb global warming and the illegitimate and corrupt supreme court is another. The loss of middle class, and the control of the rich in politics is another. I think a lot about Wynn Alan Bruce.

Now I don't think you should just go and not pay taxes willy nilly, just because you're a little disgruntled. I had a logic professor who withheld a percentage of his taxes spent on military budget. I thought that was cool and principled. Never knew what happened to him about that. I google him and no info. Anyway, I think it has to be a highly considered principle stand. 

I think more often than I would like to admit about the show The Good Place. That you can't be ethical in this day and age, you participate unwillingly in too much bad stuff. Thoreau wanted to live a deliberate life, and standing up for his distaste for the Mexican-American War and Slavery was a deliberate stand against them. It may have been puny, but it inspired Gandhi and MLK, so maybe it wasn't that small.

I don’t really agree that the government should always do less. To me roads, garbage removal, the 1,700 parks in New York City, and many efforts are in our own best interest. Still, a fascinating essay.

Links:

Sonlit: Her point is that Thoreau is often view from a narrow viewpoint regarding his night in jail. "This compartmentalizing of Thoreau is a microcosm of a larger partition in American thought, a fence built in the belief that places in the imagination can be contained. Those who deny that nature and culture, landscape and politics, the city and the country are inextricably interfused have undermined the connections for all of us (so few have been able to find Thoreau’s short, direct route between them since). This makes politics dreary and landscape trivial, a vacation site. It banishes certain thoughts, including the thought that much of what the environmental movement dubbed wilderness was or is indigenous homeland — a very social and political space indeed, then and now — and especially the thought that Thoreau in jail must have contemplated the following day’s huckleberry party, and Thoreau among the huckleberries must have ruminated on his stay in jail."

I like this bit: "Conventional environmental writing has often maintained a strict silence on or even an animosity toward the city, despite its importance as a lower-impact place for the majority to live, its intricate relations to the rural, and the direct routes between the two." 

Moving to the country and cutting down trees to live in a new house, has more impact than staying in the city and reducing human impact on nature. 

Trivia: Robert E. Lee wrote a play about Thoreau's night in jail. Wonder if he understood that he was doing it because of slavery, in part. I'll have to read it. Turns out it's not that Robert E. Lee who wrote it.