Civil Disobedience

When we were young in the U.S., Martin Luther King was alive and leading the struggle to attain equal rights for African- Americans by using "Civil disobedience" as a primary technique to bring about change. We learned that he took the concepts used by Mohandas K. Gandhi in India as the basis for what he did in the U.S. The idea seems pretty straightforward - you get a large number of people to disobey an unjust law to bring attention to it and hope that enough other people recognize the correctness of the stand and bring about change. With large numbers of people you get attention and the police forces have a difficult time enforcing the offending law, because there are so many people to deal with. Of course there were violent reactions too- many people in India were killed or injured and this was true in the U.S. too. However, on the whole the moral courage and correctness of the views of the protesters can be seen to have won out through their attempts to remain non-violent in their own actions.
Gandhi's birthday is approaching on Oct. 2 and it is celebrated as a national Holiday in India.
We were reflecting on his concept of civil disobedience and how remarkable his accomplishment was to win the independence of what is now well over 1 billion people. We became amused by the idea that the people had to be encouraged to violate some of the British laws, because we find it more common that the natural behavior of the people is to ignore most laws! So, In some sense it seems that what was really accomplished was to ORGANIZE all of this "civil disobedience" rather than to create it for unjust laws. Of course, that organization was quite a big accomplishment in any case.
The place where most people see the blatant disregard for laws is in the traffic- this is a topic of discussion among nearly all foreigners as well as most old- time Bangaloreans who also dread driving in the traffic of today. They might also have ignored the laws in the past, but there were a lot fewer people, so it was of less consequence and stress then. Undoubtedly, there are many other examples.