"But its against the law!"

Scores of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters were arrested on Wall Street this morning for breaking the law and clashing with police. I found these civil disobedience quotes on another site, which seem quite appropriate for today (not sure who actually collected these quotes).

• Dare to do things worthy of imprisonment if you mean to be of consequence. ~Juvenal
• Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one. ~Chinese Proverb
• Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. ~Albert Einstein
• No radical change on the plane of history is possible without crime. ~Hermann Keyserling
• When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders. ~Veterans Fast for Life
• It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. ~Voltaire
  If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849
• You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it. ~Malcolm X
• Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason. ~Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion
• Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. ~Mark Twain
• Integrity has no need of rules. ~Albert Camus
  If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. ~Louis D. Brandeis
• Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool. ~John J. Miller, And Hope to Die
• Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices. ~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
  Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
• We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." ~Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Why We Can't Wait, 1963
• We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong.... There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them. ~Alexander Bickel
• It is necessary to distinguish between the virtue and the vice of obedience. ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911
• I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not so desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. ~Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849
• As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever. ~Clarence Darrow
• It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. ~Edmund Burke, Second Speech on Conciliation, 1775
• I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. ~Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime. ~Martin Luther King, Jr., March 22, 1956
• If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. ~Bishop Desmond Tutu
• It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

There are those who believe that we the people are no longer owners of our own country and the only way to call attention to that is to break a few laws that have been set up to control the undesirables (guess those laws against the homeless had enough loopholes to apply to the middle class). Those people that those who do own the country, whoever "they" really are, spend billions of dollars every year lobbying their paid for Congress, so heavily influenced that they made pizza a vegetable, to get what they want, which is more for themselves and less for everybody else. They don't want their paid for politicians to get a whiff of public dissent or worse, to have the dissent spread and that one way to do this is to pass laws restricting the rights of the masses on the assumption that the masses will not challenge these restrictions because it is the law.

They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking pondering why there is such a strict crackdown on protestors, apparently coordinated by Homeland Security (you didn't think they would only go after international terrorists did you?),  and why the media seems to be in favor of this crackdown, that came without warning even as the start of winter was probably about to end protests in northern cities (or not, people in Maine are used to cold). They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. Investing in schools or infrastructure doesn't help their profit margins today.That is against their interests. And they have shown that they will use violence against the people to protect those interests.

Those people think they have discovered what they want and are trying to warn all of us that it is past time to wake up. They want obedient workers who are just educated enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but not so educated that they don't just passively accept the new new deal with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pensions.  Those are worried that they want the rest of our retirement money, attacking social security and medicare, so we will have to keep working.

Watching the police crack down on the people with whatever excuse the politicians can come up with. I have to wonder if  those people are correct and the increasingly violent crackdowns by law enforcement are because they are freaked that the OWS protestors will wake we the sheeple who will stop electing those who don't really care about good honest hard-working people. Are they  worried that those hard working people, sick of seeing wages stay stagnant while cost of living rises while they (usually those who control corporations, who are people too, and banks) destroy the environment while buying out our government and police forces to keep those people in line, are about to cause a problem?

Are they afraid that people will notice that tax dollars are being spent on tear gas to control while they and their politicians continue to demand that tax dollars not be spent on healthcare to heal? Are they worried that more middle class people may realize we have a growing income inequality gap that will come to fruition before they have finished dumbing down our education system?

And before someone calls me a liberal pinhead or something, let me state that I believe that the the Tea Party and the OWS movement are really both screaming the same message. Both see that the system we now have is falling apart. While they may disagree on subjects such as cutting spending on welfare and medical care they probably agree on many more areas of concern. Is it a coincidence that Tea Party supporters are saying they are nothing like the OWS protestors (I'm not talking about the Tea Party members themselves, but those who finance them). 99% of us are those people and the 1% keep hoping that we will be too busy fighting amongst ourselves to forget about them. Something about united we stand, divided we fall comes to mind.

We are the People. We the People are  in charge, not the businesses, not the politicians, but We. The. People. This should be, as the saying goes, self-evident.There is more going on here then we realize. No justice, no peace.