For Monday: Miller, ch. 1-5.
Student time today: 12:30- 1 PM, may be here later, too. Email ahead.
Looking forward to writeups this week. No writeups next week.
One more writeup after that: you may send it to me anytime in the last two weeks of class.
TACTICS
- RULE 1: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
- RULE 2: Never go outside the experience of your people
- RULE 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy
- RULE 4: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
- RULE 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
- RULE 6: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. (compare with p. 139-41)
- RULE 7: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
- RULE 8: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
- RULE 9: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
- RULE 10: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
- RULE 11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
- RULE 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
- RULE 13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
TIME IN JAIL" (156-158)
YOU express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all."
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an "I - it" relationship for the "I - thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn't segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.
Let us turn to a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.
Let me give another explanation. An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically structured?
These are just a few examples of unjust and just laws. There are some instances when a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I was arrested Friday on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong with an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade, but when the ordinance is used to preserve segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and peaceful protest, then it becomes unjust.
Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil
disobedience.
We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws.
Equality, Education, and Class
The share of U.S. aggregate income accounted for by upper-income households has increased from 29% in 1970 to 50% in 2020. Part of this increase reflects the rising share of adults who are in the upper-income tier. https://t.co/5NdUgKzkD4 pic.twitter.com/q5JwWWLn7v
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) April 24, 2022
From U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education StatisticsL
- Of students who enrolled in public four-year universities, 45% had parents with college degrees and 26% did not
- One third of first-generation students dropped out of college after three years, compared to 14% of those whose parents did have a degree
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