In response to the moment

There is a famous- historically inaccurate-but nonetheless mythically accurate scene in
UU/American history where Ralph Waldo Emerson goes to the local jail to bail out his friend
Henry David Thoreau. You may be familiar with it.
Thoreau, and this part is true, was arrested and placed in jail for refusing to pay his taxes as a
protest of the Mexican American War. A war he felt was an expression of America’s worst
expansionist and oppressive instincts.
In a play mythologizing the moment, Emerson asks his dear friend Thoreau what he is doing in
there, (referring to jail) to which Thoreau retorts, something to the effect… “My dear Waldo,
what are you doing out there?” Those are not the exact quotes, brought to life by a famous play,
but it captures the twist.
In an essay written shortly after his short time in jail Thoreau captured his opinions quite clearly.
In an essay that has come to be known as “Civil Disobedience.” he says
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

That sentiment captures this moment we are in right now. Right now in ways that continue to
stymie and dismay.
We as a nation don’t want to fully support Ukraine, who was unjustly invaded by the Soviet
Union, but, we will actively bomb and capture the leader of a nation like Venezuela who
although corrupt, happens to have a lot of oil.
We risk setting the precedent of ICE officers NOT being held accountable for the murder of the
people they are attempting to apprehend, at the exact same time we are looking to force another
independent country to sell us Greenland.
Disgusting.
On an earth that desperately needs to begin cooperating in order to save future generations from
a fast eroding climate, we have an administration concerned about a new national expansionism,
renewing its old racism, and led by a man who read and re-read Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Unacceptable.
I, likely along with you, are waiting for a moment …the moment when America will again
choose to return to its best side, it’s morally expansionist side that always has the potential for.
Maybe the death of Renee Good will be that moment.

I know that I am a minister, and we are a church that is mandated to avoid engaging in partisan
politics. However, it is more than a deeply set tradition and precedent within our religious
heritage to stand up to any and every organized effort to challenge our most deeply held norms
and values. And that is sadly where we are.
We must fight against the forces that want to define the world in ways that violate our
commitment to truth. Which is exactly what they want to do.
We must fight for the inherent worth and dignity of all people. For that is largely the norms they
are trying to undermine
We must not cower to those who wish to undermine democratic principles, rules, and norms.
For that is what is underway.
And, we must not fail to speak up for our inherently interconnectedness. Because, that is what is
seen as the enemy of those in power.
May we be that church and those people who don’t bow, and who aren’t silent.
Thank you for all you are doing. Don’t stop.
Rev. Steve

On this day in 1846, Henry David Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond
brief walk into town and ended up in the Concord jail for refusing to pay his poll
tax. A fervent abolitionist, Thoreau explained, “I cannot for an instant recognize .
. . as my government [that] which is the slave’s government also.” The next
morning, he learned that someone had paid the tax. He never knew who.
Although Thoreau objected, the constable insisted on releasing him. This
experience led him to write a powerful lecture on the “relation of the individual to
the State.” The lecture was published in 1849 as “Resistance to Civil
Government,” and is now known as “Civil Disobedience.” This masterful essay
has influenced generations of activists, including Mahatma Gandhi and Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Other than a rowboat and his books, he owned
almost nothing. He boarded mostly with his
family, and on several occasions, with the
Emersons.
Henry David Thoreau was on an errand in town when he encountered Sam
Staples, the Concord constable, tax collector, and jailer. Staples took the
opportunity to ask Thoreau to pay his back taxes. The independent-minded,
highly principled naturalist refused, and Staples politely escorted him to jail.
“The best place for each is where he stands,” Thoreau once wrote. When he found
himself incarcerated, he took full advantage of the new experience. Fascinated, he
“pumped” his cellmate for “the history of the various occupants of that room
[and] found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never
circulated beyond the walls of the jail.” The next morning, his fellow-prisoner was
sent “to work at haying in a neighboring field,” while Thoreau was told he must
leave the jail.
It was not the brevity of his stay that angered him but the interference with his
act of conscience and the fuss it caused. For the past six years, he had refused to
pay the poll tax (imposed on all males 20 to 70 years old) to protest the
institution of slavery. To his great annoyance during his short stay in jail,
someone paid it for him.
. . . he “pumped” his cellmate for “the history of
the various occupants of that room [and] found
that even here there was a history and a
gossip which never circulated beyond the walls
of the jail.”
Thoreau’s mother and sisters were active in the Women’s Anti-Slavery Society of
Concord, founded in 1837, and he had long been involved in the anti-slavery
movement, but he preferred to protest through individual action. His family
sheltered a number of fugitive slaves, and he would escort them to the next safe
house or to an out-of-the-way train station. He delivered powerful lectures
against slavery. And he withheld his taxes.
As he later wrote in “Civil Disobedience,” he believed “it is not a man’s duty, as a
matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most
enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it
is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and . . . not to give it practically his
support.”
Henry David Thoreau always had “other concerns to engage him.” Born in
Concord on July 12, 1817, he attended school there, and except for short trips,
primarily in New England, rarely left the town he described as “the most
estimable place in all the world.” After graduating from Harvard in 1837, he
taught school for three years and then joined his father at the family pencil
factory.
Exceptionally practical and resourceful, Thoreau improved pencil lead by baking
the graphite mixture into cylinders and invented a machine that drilled a hole in
the wood so the lead cylinder could simply be slipped in. John Thoreau &
Company pencils were considered the best on the market. But once Henry had
mastered the problem, he moved on. Life, he declared, “is too valuable to put into
lead-pencils.”
“. . . it is not a man’s duty, as a matter of
course, to devote himself to the eradication of
any, even the most enormous wrong; . . . but it
is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it,
and . . . not to give it practically his support.”
Having never married, Henry Thoreau could choose not “to keep pace with his
companions,” and, indeed, he heeded “a different drummer.” He kept his needs
simple. Other than a rowboat and his books, he owned almost nothing. He
boarded mostly with his family, and on several occasions, with the Emersons.
When he ran out of money, he took a paid job until he was flush again. He could
always find work as a surveyor, and he was a skilled carpenter. “He chose to be
rich,” wrote his friend Emerson, “by making his wants few and supplying them
himself.”
On July 4, 1845, Thoreau moved into the one-room cabin he had built on land
Emerson owned on the shores of Walden Pond. “I went to the woods,” he wrote,
“because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and
see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover
that I had not lived.”
In the months that followed, he worked in his two-and-a-half-acre vegetable
garden, rowed his boat, and observed the smallest details of nature around him.
He read, walked, and wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and
the first of seven drafts of Walden. He received visitors often and was himself a
frequent dinner guest at his parents’ or friends’ homes. Besides his one-night stay
in jail, his time at Walden was interrupted by a trip north into the Maine forests.