It's election day, an interesting time when, as I've been, you're reading Henry David Thoreau. I started reading Walden, Thoreau's alleged masterpiece, several weeks ago, giving it the same intense attention that a Russian weight-lifter gives the kilograms on his shoulder. Truth is, I'd started reading Thoreau several times before and never could keep from falling asleep. I had trouble stringing two paragraphs together before my eyes crossed. So it was with great resolve that I attacked him this time around. Now I'm about two-thirds the way through Walden, and the notes that I've been keeping on the inside back cover are developing into quite a long list. I guess in earlier attempts, I didn't recognize that I was dealing with a philosopher and so wasted time trying to understand the plot.
In any case, the book I have is a small anthology of Thoreau's writing. A couple of days ago, I opened it not to Walden but to an essay titled: Civil Disobedience. Here, Thoreau uses his personal experience getting thrown into jail for refusing to pay his poll tax to discuss a citizen's responsibility toward the government.
Thoreau had resisted the tax because he didn't want to fund a government that supported slavery. He lived in Massachusetts, but Congress had recently enacted the Runaway Slave Act, which required any state to capture and return to their "owners" slaves that had managed to escape. Thoreau said he refused to support such a government.
That started me thinking whether there were any laws that our current government enforces and with which I have bedrock disagreement sufficient to draw me into an act of civil disobedience.
There are two. One is the law allowing capital punishment. The other is the collection of laws prohibiting the sale and use of certain drugs.
Briefly, I am opposed to capital punishment because I believe that it fails in its stated purpose -- discouraging the commission of certain crimes -- but that it succeeds in promoting one of our lowest impulses as human beings -- revenge. Hangings and beheadings in earlier times drew great crowds filled with no higher moral impulse than bloodlust . Executions are now more private and more sterile, but they still feed our lowest instincts. I don't think that humans are necessarily perfectable. But I don't see it as my government's role to to encourage such low values, either. Why, I ask myself, is it illegal for me to crush my neighbor's skull with a rock but fine for me and my fellow citizens, with my government's blessing, to stone someone to death? The one is no more moral than the other.
I could go on arguing about morality, and at some point I probably will.
But for the second issue: The War on Drugs and the laws that justify it, again briefly, the nation tried the same policy when it came to the use of alcohol. Prohibition, as it was called, did nothing to dampen society's thirst for a drink. What it did do was create a business for those individuals ruthless enough to take advantage of the law and to provide the populace with their drink. And, of course, Prohibition created an industry of law enforcement -- an industry with a guaranteed future and many advancement opportunities for police officers, judges, lawyers and jailers.
We ended Prohibition for a reason. It didn't work. But we had this "infrastructure" with little to do and so we decided to come down hard on another source of addiction. (Sure, that's simplifying a difficult situation. Drugs cause great tragedies in people's lives. But as my father, Archie Campbell, always said: You can't legislate against vice.)
Archie had another favorite saying: My country, may she always be right. But right or wrong, my country.
When I was younger, I equated that sentiment to a responsibility for blind support of one's country and the government directing the fortunes of its citizens.
Then along came the Vietnam War, and I started to wonder.
And now comes Thoreau, and I feel called upon to express to my fellow citizens the wrongness I see in capital punishment and in the drug laws.
I've checked in the dictionary for definitions of a couple of words. There's "republic" and "allegiance" and "pledge". And I've decided that one's higher calling, above allegiance to one's nation and its government, should be allegiance to what you perceive as truth. Because when the population lives by truth and charity toward one another alone, it may be  that government is unneeded.
From this point on, I will pledge my allegiance to truth and nothing less.