Disobedience

“The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government pre-supposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.”

Benjamin Stillman was reading, for the second time (his form of entertainment), George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796. He was astounded by its prescience, but wondered how the formation of political parties could have been avoided as Washington had hoped. He noticed, too, that Washington was not assuming, at that date, that America would grow into a “great nation,” only that it had every chance of doing so.

Ben was slightly disgusted to see that the House of Representatives had quit the annual Washington’s birthday reading of this text in 1979 (almost a decade before he was born!) because attendance had dwindled. Did the Senate still read it? He’d have to look that up. Yes, Geo W’s language at first glance seemed the very essence of circumlocution, resembling the flimsy lotsa-big-words mockery of anti-intellectuals trying to amuse. But every word, every phrase, was precise; it was the work of a man wanting to be perfectly understood (perhaps without losing the love of the people, or most of them). There certainly was an eagerness to clarify.

Ben remembered that Orville had once stated (years ago before they’d started S&C) that even if a law is unjust, we should all obey it until it’s changed. Geo W would have approved. Knowing that the really wealthy did not have to obey ANY law, Ben, not being poor, but not being wealthy either, wanted the option to disobey too. There wasn’t time enough in anyone’s life to postpone defying an unjust law! Look at the women’s suffrage movement! The civil rights movement! The gay rights movement! But then, he thought, if civil disobedience were more accepted, ordinary people might want to quit paying taxes entirely. Maybe Geo W was right.

The letter of the law aside, though, there had been “shortcuts” that Mrs. Johnson had refused to apply in her near-constant pursuit of insurance company reimbursements on behalf of S&C. At first, when she (and in fact, he and Orville too) were new at this game, Ben took pride in the integrity of his one dedicated employee, but in talking to other business people since, he’d realized that it might be simpler to, for instance, use top retail prices for these negotiations instead of the everyday discounted (but still way over cost) prices that someone coming in off the street to purchase, say, a knee brace would pay.

He’d suggested adopting these tactics to her again recently. But no, Mrs. Johnson seemed to want to protect insurance companies— of all entities— from overpaying. She had told him that she was, in this way, helping to keep everyone’s medical bills in general from inflating, and that the professional association of women accountants (which she claimed she met with regularly) had had discussions about this.

And now Orville wanted to pay Mrs. Johnson a full-time salary to lose S&C’s money? Really, that’s what she was doing already, and she’d be doing it for 40 hours a week instead of 25!

As was his habit when he felt himself getting upset, Ben took several very deep, slow breaths. He was not, after all, an accountant himself. He’d only taken a few business courses at Randolph Community College after he and Orville had started their first business— the one that didn’t make it— the bookstore called “Great Nation.” Ben was what people called a history buff, and that had been his dream: a bookstore focusing on American history from the founders to the present. But there weren’t enough college students or interested readers in his small city, and books were certainly not what tourists wanted. After two years of getting deeper into debt and then finally admitting failure, Ben had wanted desperately to abandon Tennessee for more lucrative pastures (there were none "greener" literally speaking), but Orville, who was also in debt, had talked him out of it.

— Macoff