Letters From A Birmingham Jail By Martin Luther King Jr.

Peaceful resistance to laws positively impacts a free society, as it forces people to confront issues, leading to advancements for the true majority of society.

As Martin Luther King said in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," nonviolent direct action creates such a tension that an community is forced to negotiate the issue that is once ignored. This is especially important as usually oppressors have no concept of the severity of a situation, as they have not lived it themselves. People with privileges don't typically see the invisible cruelties needed to maintain the status quo. This is why peaceful resistance is much more expedient than protestation in the form of voting or working within the system of government, which Thoreau notes in his

As Martin Luther King Jr. observes in his "Letters From a Birmingham Jail," it is a sad thing when people condemn the effects of civil disobedience without considering the conditions which festered and led to such a nonviolent protest. As Thoreau writes in his "Civil Disobedience," too much respect for the law can lead people to blindly to terrible things. Consider the Germans who, out of fear of the law, committed the atrocities of the Holocaust; or, the participants of the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures, in which men were instructed to continuously 'shock' a hidden person, and which, goaded on by the authority figure, continued even until the subject of the punishment (in actuality an actor) 'died.' Those who choose to take action to take down laws that do not uphold the morals of the people as a whole work instead towards a society based on considered values that respect all of its

With Edward Snowden's NSA leaks, this issue was brought into relief. Was he full of moral superiority over a gray issue, or was he "that most awkward and infuriating of creatures-- a man of conscience," as John Cassidy wrote in his article "Why Edward Snowden is a Hero." Because, while Jeffrey Toobin wrote in "Edward Snowden is No Hero" that Snowden's leak was cemented in grandiose narcissism over an issue American citizens should have already digested, wasn't it after his leak that there arose an uproar over the NSA activities, which inevitably placed a modicum of agency back in the hands of the American people? I still wonder whether my perspective would be the same had Snowden released files which did more lasting harm to national security. But in that case, would that activism now be violent, instead of