I got words

People are angry. And violence is sweeping the globe.

They couch it in noble language: Arab Spring. Defending the middle class. Protecting our rights. Even defending liberty.

But it’s still plain old senseless violence: Beating someone about the head, or killing them, in the belief that will convince others your cause is right and just.

All too often all that is accomplished is continuing the ancient cycle of violence – an eye for an eye, or replacing one violent tyrannical regime with a new violent tyrannical regime. The success of such revolutions is imaginary and temporary.

Through the years some have tried to show a better way – men like Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus of Nazareth – changing the world through civil disobedience, nonviolence, noncooperation. A way that does not meet violence with hatred and more violence.

The novel The Imaginary Revolution, which officially debuts tomorrow, is set on a planet light years away. But I mean to say something about the here and now.

'The definition of a peaceful revolution'

(This is the introductory essay to my newly published edition to Resistance to Civil Government a k a On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. Always feel free to order one or more handsome dead-tree copies of this edition at this link.)
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Even a cursory reading of Henry David Thoreau’s immortal essay about civil disobedience reveals echoes in contemporary discussions of individual rights and the limits of government in a free society.

Its themes resonate into the 21st century. Faced with a federal government that condoned the institution of slavery and was waging a war of questionable origin in Mexico, Thoreau pushed his readers to consider the responsibility of an individual with conscience.

What Thoreau said about Mexico could have been said yesterday about whatever foreign adventure the current U.S. president has sent the military on (and I refrain from naming a specific president or adventure because this has been happening for several administrations, “right” and “left,” as of this writing – witness Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya ...):

“when ... a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.

“What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”

Thoreau wrote about slavery as the ultimate violation of the individual, and although it may have been revolutionary to think of a slave as an individual, his context provides insights into what it means to be an individual as well.

Launch: 'Resistance to Civil Government' by Henry David Thoreau

I am pleased to announce the latest addition to my little stable of books and ebooks, a new and easy-to-read edition of Resistance to Civil Government, also known as On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.

Even a cursory reading of Henry David Thoreau’s immortal 1849 essay reveals echoes in contemporary discussions of individual rights and the limits of government in a free society.

Its themes resonate into the 21st century. Faced with a federal government that condoned the institution of slavery and was waging a war of questionable origin in Mexico, Thoreau pushed his readers to consider the responsibility of an individual with conscience.

This new edition includes “The definition of a peaceable revolution,” an introductory essay by yours truly.

You can read Resistance to Civil Government online or download the ebook at this link ...

or you can purchase a durable and permanent copy complete with this lovely cover, made from the finest of dead trees, by following THIS LINK.