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ISSUE17 - "There are two types of laws: just and unjust. Every individual in a society has a responsibility to obey just laws and, even more importantly, to disobey and resist unjust laws."
WORDS: 672 TIME: 100MIN
There stands out every court a unicorn emblematizing the justice of the law. No one would argue that everybody in the society should obey laws and law is the basic line for morality which promises the social stability. The speaker holds the thought that laws could be differentiated into just and the unjust ones, accentuating the importance of civilians to disobey and resist the latter ones under the condition of obeying just laws. In my opinion, few would oppose to the responsibility for people to act within the legitimation, however, the recommendation made by the speaker to ask people to resist the unjust laws seems to be too radical, not only for the reason of obscure criteria for human being to identify laws as just or unjust, but potential riots it might provoke by which more civil rights would be infringed.
Admittedly, law represents the basic ethnical line and common accepted values of any society. Obeying to the laws is the axiomatic sense of citizens at any time, in any country. We could easily find petroglyph indicating tribal regulations, the primitive pattern of laws, for the ones who contravened it. Or there's the Obelisk still standing outside of the ancient temple in Egypt, reminding everybody passing in front of it the dignity of the laws. And unicorn is more than the chimera depicted in the myths to deter children. Such basic lines serve not only as the promise for morality, but protect individual rights and ensure the stability of the society.
Furthermore, law mainly carries the impression of its co-existed social ideology and acts for the predominant people. For than matter, concerning with the justification of the law, there always emerges the confliction between the predominance and those ones being controlled. I believe no one among ascendancy in medieval Europe suspected the justice of the laws for aristocrats to own all the lands, arable or not, and most of the foods. Or hadn't it be considered as the just laws for the owners of the plantations in colony states to have slaves, even though magnates there were fighting for freedom and democracy, African Americans would had suffered less from disastrous lives under the slavery before the Civil War. And no individual in Nazi administration alleged it unjust to enact the laws for Jewish annihilation. There for, it's so hard for the contemporary people to have objective evaluation on laws, only history tells.
On another hand, human can get lessons from history and amends laws, radical protesting or even resisting laws might be counterproductive and used by those desperadoes and riffraff. The riots in 1992 Los Angelus naturally comes to my mind. Although it was apparent that officers who committed felony against the over-speeder, King, received minor penalty from the court, over-reaction against such unfair conviction were soon led to riots all over the communities in suburb L.A, more innocents were killed during the time and surely everyday life was severely interfered, kids afraid of being insulted on way to school, stores crashed by the agitated youngsters. In the later stage, little could be found as the indication of pursuing justice, let alone the great tumult. Or the riot happened in 2005 near Paris was initially provoked by the protests for new unjust labor laws depriving the rights of new employees to get same payments as others. Simply acts against laws to express the assertion over unfairness might probably worsen the situation other than invoke reforming.
In sum, there's no space left for the suspicion of the responsibility of people to obey the laws. And it's hard to tell out what kind of law is just or not. Holding a composed attitude towards any issue concerning about the justice of laws could be a better choice. We might have made mistakes or violated some parts of human rights by carrying out impropriate laws, but we still have the chance to amend it, modify it into a better state for representing more broad spectrum of people's rights, that's what we really want from democracy. |
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