History is brimming with acts of rebellion. For various reasons, many dissatisfied individuals or groups of people have rebelled against the status quo.
The United States was founded by rebels. While it may be difficult to point to any one single event that led to the American Revolution, undoubtedly the American colonists felt they were entitled to the full democratic rights of Englishmen. On the other hand, the British viewed the Thirteen Colonies as possessions, and its inhabitants as subjects to be exploited in whichever ways best suited Great Britain. These conflicting views made rebellion inevitable.
Rosa Parks, a black woman who became known as the “mother of the civil rights movement” was an American rebel of another sort. Rosa worked as a seamstress at a local department store in Montgomery, Alabama. On her way home from work one day in 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. This simple act of defiance helped galvanize the civil rights movement, and changed the course of US history.
If Rosa Parks was the mother of the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the father of the struggle for racial equality. He once said, “There is a great day ahead. The future is on its side. It’s going now through the wilderness, but the Promised Land is ahead.” Both Rosa Parks and Dr. King rebelled against a system that was both unjust and illegitimate.
“The system” as I refer to it in this book, applies to any set of values, methods, rules, regulations, or laws intended to control or govern behavior. All systems are constantly subject to change, and therefore can be modified, and possibly transformed. In fact, even the most entrenched systems – be they political, social, religious, cultural, bureaucratic, corporate, or legal – are open to change.
Rebels attack prevailing systems in which they find themselves by challenging conventional ideas, institutions and laws. In effect, they challenge old customs, habits, regulations, and laws that no longer have merit – if they ever did.
The rebel may be someone who is part of a larger social movement, or simply the lone individual who decides to fight city hall.
Or, they may be an employee who spots corruption and decides to blow the whistle.
The Rebel and this website explores various ways in which the author has rebelled and so can you in your own way. Again, always stay within the framework of the law.
