As I learned from the PBS documentary by Ken Burns, Henry David Thoreau was active in the abolitionist movement in New England, influenced by his mother Cynthia and his sisters Sophia and Helen (Helen Thoreau served as secretary for the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society).
As a feminist, it made sense for me to learn that the Suffragists, who fought for women’s right to vote, also wished to abolish slavery and secure universal human rights.
Read “Abolitionist Origins of American Feminisms” in MS. Magazine.
“Civil Disobedience” is an essay by Thoreau published in 1849 with the title “Resistance to Civil Government.”
Here’s a few sentences:
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?
“A very few -as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers- serve the state with their consciences.
“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”
Read the entire text at this link.
This essay inspired non-violent protest leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Today it may give some courage to the spineless Republicans in Congress in opposing President Donald Trump’s abuses of power.
Last November Arizona senator Mark Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers (three were women) released a video warning that the Trump administration was “pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.” It also told troops to “refuse illegal orders.”
Trump reacted on Truth Social: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH! HANG THEM.”
In January 2026 Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut, sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (who had threatened to reduce his rank and retirement pay) for violating his free speech rights.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed 82 lawsuits against the Trump administration since January 2025, defended birthright citizenship, ended National Guard deployments.
California Governor Gavin Newson sued Trump in June 2025. In September 2025 U.S. district judge Charles Breyer ruled that the use of the National Guard violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, that makes it a felony for any person to use the federal military to enforce federal law.
In her MS NOW weekly show political commentator Rachel Maddow has been covering anti-Trump protests, interviewing people like Democratic senator Jon Osoff, warning that Trump might be planning to declare a national emergency and cancel the November mid-term elections.
Actor and activist John Leguizamo, who plays Eumaeu in The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan, posted a reminder on Facebook: “No federal election in the United States has ever been cancelled due to war or any other reason. The U.S. Constitution does not grant any President any authority to cancel a federal election.”
Professor and author Robert Reich posts daily comments in his Substack about pushing back against Trump and his oligarchy of billionaires. On August 16 he proposed once again “to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment, by reason of insanity.”
As if to prove this point, on August 15 a draft-dodger delusional Trump posted on his Truth Social platform this AI generated photo of himself as heroic a general as Patton and MacArthur.
And let’s not forget that on April 12 Trump portrayed himself as Jesus…
A powerful voice against Trump’s illegal incarceration and deportation of immigrants has been Pope Leo XIV, the first American elected to lead the Catholic Church in May 2025.
The Pope also spoke against war. On May 14, 2026 he said to students and professors at La Sapienza University in Rome:
“What kind of world are we leaving behind? A world, sadly, crippled by wars and the rhetoric of war.
“Over the past year, the increase in military spending worldwide, and particularly in Europe, has been enormous: let us not call “defence” a rearmament that increases tensions and insecurity, depletes investment in education and health, undermines trust in diplomacy, and enriches elites who care nothing for the common good.
“What is happening in Ukraine, Gaza and the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iran illustrates the inhuman evolution of the relationship between war and new technologies into a spiral of annihilation.”
It’s time for all of us to protest and do all we can to exercise some well-justified “civil disobedience.”
Please read here my previous article “Thoreau and Nature.”
And here my 2024 article “Sedona, Red Rock Country,” when I learnt that Sedona Schnebly, a member of the WCTU (Woman’s Christian Temperance Union), later joined the suffrage movement.