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Happy MLK Monday, y’all. You can celebrate Disobey Day by using the day off to break an unjust law and disobey an unjust authority today. “You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. … One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that AN UNJUST LAW IS NO LAW AT ALL. … So I can urge men to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.” —Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (April 16, 1963) http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to THE GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD TODAY — MY OWN GOVERNMENT. . . . “… A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.” —Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” (April 4, 1967). http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/04/07/official_national/