By T.J. Ray

Columnist

Rosa Parks has been much on my mind of late. A while ago I sat on a five-gallon plastic  bucket on the north shore of Sardis Lake for several hours, hoping to get a good  photograph of an Osprey. 

As I sat there under a wonderful blue sky, lined now and then by jet contrails, with chilly  winds making me wish I had a jacket, and not a person near enough to be heard, my  mind whispered “Walden Pond” to me. Yes, I know minds don’t whisper. And, yes, I know that the only similarity between Walden Pond and Sardis Lake is that they are  containers of water. But something—the quiet, the solitary setting, the sheer majesty of  God’s world—triggered memories of Thoreau’s retreat. Bits of his little book that I read and tried to teach for several decades came to mind. 

And thoughts of Thoreau led to thinking of his other works., which conjured up Rosa  Parks and her achievement, her signal act of independence. Quite without warning,  consideration of Rosa Parks erupted into memory of one of those days in a stuffy  classroom as I was (vainly in all likelihood) trying to interest sophomores in Henry David  Thoreau. You’re ahead of me. Yes, the topic for the day was his essay on Civil  Disobedience.  

One person who would have been an asset to the class was an Indian leader named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Whether Ghandi ever read Thoreau or not I can’t say. What I do conclude is that he practiced what Thoreau preached and brought about  Indian independence from Great Britain. 

My problem that morning was that no great protests were headlining the media of the  day. Taxes were being levied and paid, workers were obediently earning their wages,  and elected officials were officiating. I needed something to make civil disobedience  

real. In rather blinding flash of genius, I asked all the young ladies in the class to stand  up by their desks. They did not all leap to their feet, but in a few minutes all were  standing, looking a bit lost while most of the boys were grinning. Whatever it was, it  hadn’t happened to them. 

I went on talking about Thoreau, even reading a piece of the work to them. Probably  five minutes passed before one of the girls asked if they could be seated. I shook my  head and they continued to stand. On went the lecture. Oh, I wish I had timed the  event, but as I didn’t plan it I wasn’t ready with a stopwatch. In a few minutes one of the  bewildered girls quietly sank into her seat. A moment or two later a second one  followed, and then—sensing that I didn’t care—they all sat down. 

Though they might not have appreciated it, those kids had a tiny lesson in civil  disobedience. Granted it didn’t stop a bus in Montgomery, it didn’t free a country from a  foreign power, it didn’t result in a letter from a Birmingham jail or a march in Selma, but  it was civil disobedience nevertheless. Faced with an unreasonable situation they  revolted.

It was a quiet revolt. No media were notified to have cameras ready. No posters were  put up around the room notifying the world that they were going to show Mr. Ray he couldn’t treat them like that. No outrageous clammer. Just quiet civil disobedience.  Perhaps the key word in all this is “civil.” Thoreau and Ghandi and Rosa Parks and  Martin Luther King were of one voice: protest and rebellion may be demonstrated  without shouting and violent confrontation. Sadly, Civility has left the building.