The Boston Tea Party, Nat Turner's slave rebellion, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Edward Snowden; resistance, peaceful or not, to injustice has, since its inception, been a quintessentially American ideology, core to ensuring our tenets of civil liberty and equality go unfettered. It is ultimately on the shoulders of the citizens of a state to regulate that state as much as it is the state's responsibility to oversee its people. Therefore, when the state engages in actions which infringe on the rights of the people, with no in-built measures possible or easily accessible to lawfully enact change, those wrongfully affected ought to rise up and change those actions through force (force meaning action, not necessarily violence). An axiom …show more content…
From its inception, our great country was written on the principle that “all men are created equal,” with the definition rightfully extending to myriad minorities as time has passed. Standing up for those rights, historically, has proven to be demonstrably effective in ensuring all peoples’ rights are respected and assured. Abolitionist activists like Frederick Douglass fought verbally for freedom. First-Wave Feminists marched the streets and published manifestos calling for the right to property, to vote. African Americans such as Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks risked their lives and suffered greatly to peacefully enact change through civil disobedience. The list goes on, from protestors at Stonewall in 1969 through to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden to movements like Black Lives Matter and Third-Wave Feminism. Activism, protesting injustice through the mostly peaceful breaking of laws has an established pattern for effectively enforcing equality. Though the term of “Social Justice” has become muddled by both those who go too far and by those who resist any change in motion, locked like inertia in their current state and ways, the ultimate conclusion is that equality, and the search thereof, is a wholly worthy goal. To briefly digress from an American centered perspective and examine a global example: consider Gandhi. Here, in one man, there is the epitome of civil disobedience as a tool and vessel for peacefully protesting and nonviolently creating a better state, both in the conditional and political sense, for his people. India had, for years, been under the vampiric thumb of the British, sapping resources of all sorts, until a movement of disobedience swept across the nation, slowly and surely bringing a vassal into its own