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Civil Disobedience Now!
From Thoreau to John Lewis, a message for action that cannot wait
The sad state of our republic
It is a sad coincidence that the death of Democratic Congressman John Lewis, 80, the Georgia-born sharecropper’s son whose leonine, battle-scarred, police-beaten visage and unshakable tenacity in the face of Jim Crow-era segregation, happened on the day my audiobook version of Henry David Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, was published on Audible.
It is equally sad that on that same day, the citizens of Portland, Oregon, were experiencing the oppressive tactics of unbridled extrajudicial police overreach — verging on, if not actually encompassing, kidnapping — that both Thoreau and Lewis warned us about.
The man who stood beaten but unbowed for justice
John Lewis was never far from the top of my list of the soldiers of peace who suffered so in the cause of the Civil Rights movement.
Before taking on the self-imposed assignment of narrating Thoreau’s short essay on the importance…the imperative…of remaining true to one’s own inner voice when that voice speaks of standing strong for truth in the face of injustice and government overreach, I thought for a long time about the men…
