If you try to obey the law, and the judges call you a criminal anyway, then you might as well live up to the name.”
Unjust laws have no claim to obedience. Oppressive governments throughout history have piled law upon law, punishment upon punishment, blithely sailing along as the waves of popular resentment grew ever stormier, until they were wrecked on the shoals of rebellion.
Starting revolutions, however, is easy compared to building the new political order that comes after. All too often, we celebrate the act of rebellion, the destruction of what was, without giving the same attention to the arduous, often unglamorous work of building what will be: the compromises, the hard decisions to prioritize this over that, to demand sacrifices of some and to reward others, to delay justice in the name of expediency, to not only honor the commonweal and the republic, but to also define the very meaning of these terms.
In real life, most revolutions fail not because they can’t overthrow the unjust past, but because they can’t build a better future.
I wrote this saga to correct that bias, at least a little bit.
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