Although peaceful resistance against laws created by the government has been recently used more frequently to express political dissent towards a government and is done entirely by civilians of their nation, it has been effective over the decades as political figures such as Martin Luther King Junior has proved. Peaceful resistance has proven effective only when there has been a truly repressive control on those protesting against their government. This truly repressive control must be something worth fighting for in order to make a reform that would improve society. For example, when women fought for their right to be included in suffrage, they succeeded and did so because their belief of the government’s restriction on them was truly something …show more content…
However, the government in both state and federal levels has been seeking a way to modify this amendment. In the decades following the Second World War, the federal government began restricting the right to express opinion publicly in a socialist or communist perspective, going as far as to imprison those who believe in these perspectives. This infringes the right of citizens of the United States, however, this infringement was done to “ensure” the safety of every citizen at the time. These actions committed by the government, however, does not prove that peaceful protest is bad, but instead, proves how effective it can be. The idea of “freedom” in the line of “freedom of speech” means that one should have the right to express their speech without being harmed or harming others. However, the government violated this right and took away the freedom of speech for hundreds of innocent citizens of the United States. By taking away these rights for only a moment, those who were having their rights taken away now had a justifiable reason to peacefully protest at the risk of losing everything. Peaceful protests in the past has been effective and is done so only because people protesting feel they have been stripped of the reasonable rights that the