Satyagraha

One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

My thanks to Mariposa for putting me in mind of this quote today.

It reminds me of a tale. I am from Columbia (the city in Maryland, not COLOMBIA). One day I was out with my two young kids, my Eritrean paralegal, and his friend, who later became an asylum client, in Columbia and we were talking about the city's history of integration. See Padraic Kennedy's excellent essay

I mentioned that my interracial parents moved to Columbia when their marriage was still against state law in Virginia. My daughter piped in. How come they got married if it was against the law? I thoughtlessly responded well, if a law is unjust, you have a duty to break it. No big thing, right? It's just what you say.

In high school and college, the US civil rights struggle was presented to us like ancient history, even though we weren't but one generation removed. We grew up imagining that we would have joined the freedom rides, IF WE HAD BEEN THERE. But, these words, these concepts -- civil disobedience, creative nonviolence -- they were taught to us as finished business, something that was necessary in the bad old days. When we were wrong. Before we got right.

And, partially because I was raised in this relative utopia, my relationship to these principles is reverential, not practical. I'm a wonk; not a freedom fighter.

My clients; they are the real deal. I've had clients who were jailed, tortured, and threatened with death for such crimes as owning a Bible small enough to be hidden in an army boot, growing a beard, owning a radio, making mimeograph copies of e-mails... Who have stood before the torturer, the State, and said, if you kill me now I will still look you in the eye... Who have said, My God is a righteous God and if it His will that you kill me then I die.

The man who was with us when I said that thing to my daughter, he later became an asylum client. He told me later what an impression that comment, said thoughtlessly to a child in a public place, had on him. How privileged, how blessed, he felt to be in this country and to be among people who embraced its principles. Principles the truth of which he has felt but not had words for.

But of course, the privilege, the blessing, is on me. Because, I can quote the principles; but they live them.