Thoreau's Relevance to America Today

One hundred and sixty-four years ago today, on May 6, 1862, Henry David Thoreau succumbed to tuberculosis and died at his family home in Concord, Massachusetts. He was 44.

Thoreau remains relevant today and will continue to be for future generations because of the timeless questions he posed and the solutions he offered for living a meaningful life. “Walden; or Life in the Woods” is the 1854 book he is best known for, but the work most applicable to our times during Donald Trump’s catastrophic presidency is his 1849 essay, “Civil Disobedience.”

Thoreau’s thesis was that citizens had a moral obligation to oppose their government’s unjust and inhumane policies, even if doing so required difficult sacrifices. That’s what nearly 100,000 ordinary Minnesotans did when they braved freezing temperatures in January in Minneapolis and risked their lives to protest the illegal detention and deportation of immigrants and the killings of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by heavily armed ICE agents.

By his example, Thoreau taught us to live by the courage of our convictions. Slavery was the evil of his time. The Civil War began in April 1861, thirteen months before his death. Thoreau was active in the Underground Railroad in Concord, helping enslaved people escape to Canada. “I do not hesitate to say,” wrote Thoreau in Civil Disobedience, “that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectively withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait until they constitute a majority …”

There may not be slavery in America today, but Trump’s reckless and imperial presidency is no less evil to our polarized country. The “No Kings Day” protests against Trump would have pleased Thoreau. In the most recent one held in March this year, an estimated 9 million Americans participated across all 50 U.S. states, making it one of the largest single-day mass demonstrations in American history.

I joined about 10,000 of my compatriots in San Jose, California, where one sign in a sea of signs summed up why we were protesting: “Democracy dies when good people stay silent.” As Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience: “Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect and that will be one step toward obtaining it.” His subliminal message to us was to hope and act but not to hope more than we acted.

Trump is destroying civilizational norms and ruining America with irreversible damage by his predatory “Might is Right” and “Law of the Jungle” policies at home and abroad. He has imposed tariffs as sanctions and punishments on our allies and has threatened to commit war crimes against countries that refuse his rapacious demands. He unleashed a war of choice against Iran that continues to batter the global economy. Ordinary Americans and people around the globe are struggling to meet basic needs amid skyrocketing food and energy prices, with no end in sight. Thoreau’s call to action is as potent now as when he made it almost two centuries ago: “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.”

On July 4, 2026, we will celebrate the 250th anniversary, the semiquincentennial, of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “The American government,” wrote Thoreau in Civil Disobedience, “-what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity?”

Under Trump, America has been hemorrhaging integrity, dignity, decency and empathy at a horrific rate. It is our duty to stop this hemorrhage and restore America’s moral weight. Perhaps the best way to accomplish this is to vote for candidates in the consequential November midterm election at the House, Senate, state, and local levels who put country and Constitution above loyalty to a demagogue.

“A Rendezvous with Destiny”

In Abraham Lincoln’s time in the 1860s, it was the question of Union and Disunion, of slavery and freedom. In Franklin Roosevelt’s time in the 1930s, it was the Great Depression with its unending bread lines, and recovery through the New Deal.

During George Bush’s eight years of presidency, described by the late author David Foster Wallace as “an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate,” history repeated itself. An unspoken civil war now exists between the haves and the have-nots, subtler but no less lethal for the Union. In Northern California where I live, I see more and more people – white and black - standing by the roadside and in front of grocery stores, holding up signs that read: “Hungry. Please help.”

In their time, Americans chose Lincoln and Roosevelt to save the country. Who will they choose on November 4th this year? Lincoln speaks to us across the century and a half that separate his time from ours: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds …” Roosevelt’s words also resonate across the years: “Only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

One candidate has articulated these ideals in his campaign, convincing a vast number of voters that he can bind the nation’s wounds, reverse the economic meltdown and bring the old America back, the America that the world used to look up to, a strong and prosperous nation that put its power in the service of justice and peace at home and abroad.

That candidate is Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois, land of Lincoln.

Born in Hawaii of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, this cosmopolitan, contemplative man has gained the confidence of Americans across party lines. He has called us to a higher purpose, in which liberty and equality are not enemies but symbiotically related, and we have responded. His steady resolve, inclusive worldview, common sense and sound judgment, combined with his grace and eloquence, has so energized Americans that this election may see the highest voter turnout in U.S. history.

If one were to summarize the reasons for Obama’s astonishing rise, it would be that he engaged in the politics of hope while McCain engaged in the politics of fear.

Particularly for young Americans, this hope over fear has fired their imagination even more than what John Kennedy, the architect of the New Frontier, was able to accomplish in 1960. Obama defined his message of hope in his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004: “Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope … that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.”
An upset can still occur on November 4th. That is why Obama has appealed to his supporters not to become complacent even for a minute and to make sure that they all vote on Election Day.

McCain and Palin launched unethical, unfounded attacks against Obama by questioning his patriotism, dropping innuendos about his middle name, calling him a “socialist redistributionist” (whatever that means) and accusing him of consorting with terrorists. Americans are fed up with these negative and fear-mongering tactics. They see McCain as an extension of Bush's failed policies, and recognize that an intelligent, intellectually curious and visionary African-American, “a transformational candidate” in the words of Colin Powell, can guide the nation toward a new and humane direction as Lincoln and Roosevelt did during their times.

What about the rest of the world? Gallup Polls recently conducted in 70 countries representing nearly half the world’s population reveal that 3 out of 4 favor Obama over McCain in the U.S. presidential election.

Can Barack Hussein Obama rise to the post-election challenges if elected? Can he meet the post-election expectations? Talking heads are already raising these questions, and certainly the challenges and expectations will be exceptionally difficult to face and fulfill, but in these final hours, Americans are animated by only one hope, that after almost eight years of unrelenting national darkness, they will awake to a fresh and promising dawn on November 5th.

In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt said: “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” Seventy-two years later, so do we, so do we.

Barack Obama's Challenging Race Speech

Barack Obama's speech today on race and religion was among the most powerful and poignant speeches ever. The words were stirring, evocative, and served as a call to action on the race front in America.

We often forget that it took the United States many years after the civil war to rid itself of the evil of slavery. “And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part -- through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk -- to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time."

He addressed those who thought that he was where he was not by dint of his merit but as a result of affirmative action. At the same time, he rejected Reverend Wright’s racist remarks, repudiating his racism while harboring no hatred for the man. “On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, that rightly offend white and black alike …

“The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country -- a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen -- is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope -- the audacity to hope -- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

He was blunt about the effects of racism in our society. “Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.”

Obama is, however, not one to give in to despair and cynicism. “But I have asserted a firm conviction -- a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people -- that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union. For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances -- for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs -- to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for our own lives -- by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.”

With this speech, I believe Barack Obama has convinced a majority of undecided Americans that he is the best candidate to be the next president of the United States. His words of hope, change, action, accountability and responsibility struck a deep chord with people from all walks of life and will prove to be decisive in the November election.

Also today, the Wall Street Journal carried an article by Shelby Steele called "The Obama Bargain" in which he suggests that Obama has used his race as a "bargain." As a bargainer, Obama makes "the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain - and feel affection for the bargainer - because it gives them innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity (in italics) for whites to experience racial innocence."

This is a conspiracy theory of the most subtle kind. Mr. Steele should read Obama's speech in full (… we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap …) and recognize that his thesis is not merely untenable, it is downright disingenuous.

Barack Obama is not bargaining for anything. His sight is set on a higher plane. He is telling us that together, we are more than the sum of our creed and color. He is calling for a reconciliation grounded in our common hopes and aspirations. It is the surest way to end racism in our country as we march toward a “more perfect union.”