The Need for Social Disobedience

When I was 13, I learned there are things you don’t say at dinner parties.

My parents had invited over their long-time family friends, and when one of them casually asked me something Christianity related, I brushed it off by saying “oh no, I’m very atheist.”

To me, it was a meaningless statement. But to this White Anglo-Saxon Protestant L.L.Bean-catalogue family, it was abhorrent. I was oblivious to their reaction, but my parents later told me how visibly uncomfortable it made them and that I should avoid discussing the three “forbidden topics” at dinner parties:

Now, I’m not so sure. Polite conversation may be doing more harm than good.

Civil Disobedience

Thoreau published Civil Disobedience in 1849 as a call to arms to deliberately violate and protest laws we believe unjust. He was incensed by slavery and the Mexican-American war, and to his credit, spent a short time in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government he didn’t agree with.

Thoreau argued that we each have a conscience and that we should treat our conscience and sense of “what’s right” as a higher authority than the law:

“Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a…