Jennifer Abdo’s Reviews > A Resistance History of the United States > Status Update

"Most people, most of the time, choose safety over justice, comfort over courage, the familiar over the right. This isn't a condemnation -- it's human nature. But it makes the choice of those who chose differently all the more remarkable."

"The Underground Railroad's true history -- as opposed to its mythology -- teaches us to be skeptical of retroactive heroism. When everyone claims to have been part of the resistance, we should ask: Where were you when it mattered? When the risk was real? When the cost was high? The answers, then and now, are usually uncomfortable."

Of course! Another "One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (book by Omar El Akkad)" moment is the Underground Railroad after slavery was abolished. Suddenly every house and church has a room or secret tunnel or order space that had helped fugitive slaves. Ugh! Read both books! Both are excellent for the moment. Essential even.

At its core, all resistance makes authority pay a price for abuse. Resistance makes it pause and recalculate whether the abuse is worth the price. Sometimes that is measured in dollars, which is a much easier burden to bear than losses in lives. But that single rendition of Anthony Burns cost the federal government a fortune--the equivalent of millions in today's money... The mathematics of resistance had shifted...

"I love peace," he stated. "But there is a means, and there is an end; liberty is the end, and sometimes peace is not the means towards it."

Theodore Parker in the Burns Affair- President Pierce ordered the marines to Boston and 2000 armed men forced 21yo Anthony Burns from man to property, thru streets with buildings draped in black, a coffin labeled liberty in a window, putting abusive authority on full display.

Force the fight. Never stop. Not through days. Not through generations. Authority will always try to consolidate, to contain, to convince you that the fight is over and you've already won everything you need. The ghosts know better. They've always known better.

Suspicion is a virtue, as long as its object is the preservation of the public good.

"This book takes the side of people who resisted. ... American institutions were designed to protect property and power; the Constitution was an innovation in abusive authority that constitutionally enshrined exclusion;and progress came not from the system working as intended but from people forcing it to work differently--until the system adapted to contain them."