King's claim of lovingly breaking the law did not mean that he joyously accepted his punishment of jail time for exercising his rights in the segregated south: King may have embraced his punishment because of his hopes for change, not out of some sort of self-abnegating humility. The civil rights movement was about self-assertion of one's rights. The love in his heart came from his hope for the possibility of change. This did not mean, just like contemporary groups, that he was not outraged by his jailing and the violent actions of the police against civil rights demonstrators.
But James J. Lopach and Jean A. Luckowski seem to have another agenda: their distaste for the causes of Earth First and Act Up! are evident. It is easy to defend the disruption of the civil rights movement when it has been consigned to history. Moreover, there is the issue of comparing applies to oranges: invalidating an entire movement like Deep Ecology because it is not as collectively eloquent as a single, moral speaker also seems unfair: the authors are able to criticize environmentalism by selecting the most radical voices of the movement and selecting the most eloquent voice of the civil rights movement. Earth First and the Deep Ecology movement are also reproached because of the price their demonstrations have incurred on the part...
The civil rights demonstrators were called 'troublemakers' for 'forcing' the police to keep the peace and the eviction of the British from India came at a tremendous financial cost.
The authors fear that students will not leave the classroom with a fully integrated knowledge of Locke and Rousseau and only a half-baked notion about personal expression and its links to civil disobedience. However, Locke and Rousseau opposed the received knowledge of their era and demanded that their readers use their own experiences in a free society to ascertain new truths. Of course, students may have less fully-articulated ideas than adults -- but that can be a boon as well as a bane to society, as young people may be more motivated to challenge accepted norms regarding race, class and gender. Some expressions of civil disobedience cited by teachers may be particular to adolescent life, like debates about school uniforms. Others, such as Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail can inspire healthy debate over modern controversies, not just the historical circumstances that spawned them. These men may have submitted to their unjust punishments, but did so to change society, not out of meekness.
