Post 4: "Civil Disobedience"

http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/12/10/climate-justice-activists-announce-global-break-free-campaign-civil-disobedience-set-2016

In the work Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, he discusses how people have a conscience for a reason and that is to use it. He encourages people to protest against something especially if they don't believe it is right. Within his text he says "Must the citizen ever for a moment, in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then?" (Thoreau 213). This idea also applies to situations today such as the proposed ban on protests. These protests are trying to convey the idea that fossil fuels are destroying the earth and they have events planned as far ahead as May 2016. These people are peacefully rebelling against the government for something that they believe in, which is what Thoreau encourages us to do in Civil Disobedience. Continuing the quote from above he says "I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward"(Thoreau 213). The government wants to ban these protests

because the world needs fossil fuels to run on and they don't want any protesters changing the ideas of the people that they have set in place. Even though these are peaceful marches they still want to
shut them down and one of their "excuses" is that the situation in Paris is bad enough and that we don't need more protests. Thoreau talks about the reason why he didn't want to pay the tax, which is much of the reason that the protests are still happening. He says "... the State met me in behalf of the Church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never I myself" (Thoreau 213). In this he describes his reason for not paying which is a solid reason. This idea carries over to the current situation described above because the

only solid reason that they are giving for wanting to shut down these otherwise peaceful protests is that the situation in Paris is bad because of the recent attack and it would be a lot for them to shut these people down. Now we understand that the situation in Paris is very bad and many lives were lost, but that has nothing to do with the current situation at hand which is about the fossil fuels and how we are destroying the earth harvesting them.