American Rebellion Research Paper

It is my view that peaceful resistance to laws positively impacts a free society, if those laws or the government enforcing them are believed to be unjust. In any true democracy, the people have a right, and an obligation, to rebel against an unjust government. As Harris G. Mirkin has written, “The Declaration of Independence, a document that Jefferson claimed was merely an ‘expression of the American mind,’ declared that it was the ‘Right of the people to alter or abolish’ any government, and institute a new one that would better secure their safety and happiness.” While rebellion in any form should not be the first choice, it is occasionally the only choice. The same principles that apply to a revolutionary rebellion also apply to a peaceful …show more content…
This will force a decision to be made either for or against the principles behind the rebellion. The “court” will either decide that the rebellion is justified, and the law inciting it needs to be corrected, or that the law is correct, and the rebellion must be stopped, and those behind it need to be informed of the facts and corrected. When, for example, Rosa Parks refused to give her seat up to a white man, the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott was started, and brought attention to her rebellion against a law she believed to be unjust. As Prerana Korpe stated, “Parks was arrested for her act of civil disobedience and convicted of violating the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the South until 1965. Her arrest and subsequent appeal helped spark a 381-day-long boycott of public buses led by Martin Luther King Jr. and a court case that took Alabama’s discriminatory laws all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.” This kind of rebellion, even more so than violent rebellion, is healthy and essential to the existence of a fair and just