Civil Disobedience
Seminar Pre-write “Civil Disobedience.”
Alicia Armstrong
1. I do agree with Thoreau’s philosophy of “civil disobedience” I feel that in society today we are not really honoring his philosophy though, I feel like there are a lot of us in society who are bystanders and we see the government doing these actions that we really don’t agree with and yet we don’t stand up and voice our rights and we don’t take a stand, I’m not sure why this is exactly, I feel that if someone has something to say then they should be able to say it because we are a free people and we have the right of freedom of speech but I feel that a lot of us don’t use that. With the financial crisis we sat and we watched our government hand out all these loans to people to by houses and then we watched the government take those houses because the people couldn’t afford to pay them off. We send our troops over to other countries such as Iraq to do these good deeds and yet we hear about our soldiers going into towns killing thousands of innocent citizens and we sit back and say “oh that terrible!” and yet we don’t do anything about it! Thoreau’s philosophy is about standing up and not participating in something that goes against your morals. “Morals before government.” And I agree 100% but we don’t do it.
2. I feel that Civil Disobedience has the potential to be a sound method for promoting change, its views are solid and motivating but it’s the peoples’ job to meet Thoreau half way and a lot of us don’t do that, we can all sit around and say “yes this is what we should do!” and yet most of us don’t do it. So I feel that civil disobedience could be a active method for change but the flaws are with in the people. And it also has to do with the country to, in the USA we have the freedom of speech, but there are other countries that don’t such as the middle east more specifically in Turkey people are being killed for voicing their opinion on their government, they don’t have the rights we do so for the US it would work but other countries it wont.
3. Well I feel that civil disobedience, is more for global issues, so the protest about peace and about the environment doesn’t really fit Thoreau’s points, but the protest on natural gas and sending our soldiers to war does, so in my opinion the protests go about 50/50 its more of a question of what is being protested and what it applies to. Thoreau is more referring to if people are getting hurt of dying in the process then we should stand up, not really for the is the trees being hurt, or is this hippie’s voice being heard. So yea.
Civil Disobedience Seminar Reflection
Alicia Armstrong
• I believe that I deserve an A, because I participated in a way that made the conversation develop in a more intellectual manner. I brought people into the conversation and I challenged their responses such as when Virginia said “the government needs to stay out the peoples personal lives,” I asked her to elaborate more because in all honesty I believe that “its what the people are doing that is causing us to have such a defective, corrupt, and inadequate government. It’s the fact that the people spend all this money on stuff that they really cant afford which then results in the crash of our economy and what put us in debt. “
• Overall I feel like the seminar was very well performed, everyone seemed on task and the discussion was really well developed, going into a seminar you don’t really realize it but you are all sort of coming together as a group to collaborate and develop a new perspective on the topic. In this seminar my group all developed the idea I feel that the government is important because we all need it to keep order in society. We also came to the consensus that the government should stay out of the peoples lives when it comes to buying a selling products, like we know that’s what the government is mostly about, they just need to like focus more on the people’s interests instead of their own. Such as the time when the government/banks we giving out loans to buy houses knowing that the people couldn’t pay it off they then sold these loans on wall street and people would invest into these loans that will never be paid off and the banks would eventually get all the money and the people would be screwed over. Instead of our government corrupting us, the people, by propagandizing us into buying things we can afford out government should focus more on selling us things we can afford and it should encourage us to be more stable with out money management.
• Shawntell Stiner talked about her personal experience with the government or the Foster Care System to be exact. And how the people in the system are not really in the system for the children needs and interests they are more for the money. I was able to relate this statement to my own person experience with my cousin who was a foster child in our care, and from learning about his background and learning that he has been basically tossed around like a ball on the court from home to home, it was pretty clear that the foster care system on the Southern Ute Indian reservation isn’t there for the interests of the children, they are there for the money. From doing research my father found out that for every child the advocate gets they receive close to $8,000 and when doing even more research he found out that the whole system is really screwed up to the point that the advocates look for any reason to take a child away and if it can be backed up and proven that the mother or father is either abusing alcohol or is abusing drugs the child may be removed, or if the child is know to have missed a certain number of days from school with out an explanation. I feel like this just proves the claim that when it comes to the interests of the people or money, money is more important then the people. Which is very sad but there is a lot of evidence such as the cause of the financial crisis to modern day foster care systems to back this claim up.
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