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InjusticeUSMilitaryVsJohnBrown 17 - 20 Mar 2012 - Main.MichelleLuo
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| Due to the lack of understanding regarding John Brown's actions, I ask the question:
If the government sanctioned it, would that make it right? | | -- KippMueller - 14 Mar 2012 | |
< < | Wow, very thoughtful posts, guys! Thank you for sharing such personal experiences. I have so much I want to respond to, but I'll focus on one point for now and continue posting later this week. | > > | I can relate to Toma's description of her personal retreat to the moderate position. Growing up with conservative parents, it was definitely more convenient to stay quiet while they flipped out about my best friend in high school being gay. Discussions about politics inevitably turned into screaming matches and I became convinced that you can't influence people's opinions when they've already made up their minds. When I kept quiet, I thought I was taking the higher ground ("rationality, compromise and restraint", as Toma put it). In college, as I found more support for my positions on social issues (science, anthropology, personal experiences), I began challenging my parents' beliefs more. It was definitely inconvenient and frustrating and confrontational, but I'm grateful for those arguments. Although I disagreed with their arguments for why homosexuality is immoral, listening to their rationale helped me better understand how people come to take certain positions and how to communicate my views in a way that they would/could hear. My dad still doesn't "get gay people", but I think partly through our conversations and through the fact that I inevitably pick up gay friends wherever I go and he has to interact with them at some point, he's now for gay rights because he's come to see that his moral views shouldn't restrict what other people can do. Of course, none of what I've just described is being radical. I still used a "moderate" approach of picking and choosing fights and conceding issues I could push harder on.
Toma and William David's passages that stuck with me were:
Toma: "Moderate positions allow society to move the fulcrum closer toward justice, without demanding it outright. But in a lot of instances this simply means allowing injustice to persist in a slightly dampened way.”
William David: "It is not necessarily wrong though to share a middle ground about an issue. What is problematic is when you see corruption and do not do anything about it because you want to be safe and not "ruffle any feathers."
Courage demands radicalism. Courage occurs when someone does something that is either highly criticized, never done before, and/or poses incredible risk."
I agree with these statements, but I guess I'm struggling with when and to what extent being radical is the most effective approach. It's difficult to change people's views and particularly tricky to "ruffle feathers" with people you have close personal relationships with.
-- MichelleLuo - 19 Mar 2012 | | William David, responding to your point about using our legal education to fight social injustice, (and this is a point that I'm sure you're already aware of) I think that in order to be effective lawyers, we have to understand that the law is very limited in changing social perceptions: |
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