Rhetorical Analysis On Civil Disobedience

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When one thinks about civil disobedience they tend to think negatively about it because all laws are made and placed here for a reason, but after one reads Henry David Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience it really makes one think about how unfair some of our laws really are. In Thoreau’s essay he says that he believes, “That government is best which governs least.” Thoreau believes that the government is something unnecessary, impractical, and inconvenient. I believe that government and law was made to keep order and without it we would just have constant chaos. Yes some of the laws we have are unfair to some people but they also benefit the majority or people. The idea of personal responsibility is brought up in Thoreau’s paper. The general idea of personal responsibility is that, “human beings choose, instigate, or otherwise cause their own actions.” We cause our actions, we can be held morally accountable or legally liable. I think this idea really expresses that one should watch what they do and say more carefully, because whether ones mind is clear and they know what they are doing or if one is using a substance that alters ones state of mind, one is still going to …show more content…
They told Thoreau he has to pay or he would go to jail. Thoreau refused to pay but luckily someone else decided to pay for him. In today’s society the equivalent to that, for example, would be my parents paying taxes for public school when my brother and I attend a private school. We do not go to a public school why do my parents have to pay for both private and public school? There are a lot of example of where civil disobedience would really help a certain group of people not all. Most of the laws we have are here for a very good reason, and not all our laws help everybody but they do help a majority of

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