Civil Disobedience Henry David Thoreau

Perhaps this one suffers from anticipation: I haven't read Walden, and only know that Thoreau has a reputation for rugged individualism. And I'm all for that. But I guess I was hoping for something a little less political: Emerson on self-reliance didn't raise the issue of whether a local tax is worth avoiding--this seeming to be the substance of Thoreau's titular disobedience. He spends a single night in jail, after which his neighbors bail him out. After Eugene Debs, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, you'll have to pardon me not being impressed.

He makes some allusion to the fact that the nation at large condones slavery, which he obviously finds reprehensible. But it seems to me that since the tax he is evading is a local one, his protest as a political statement thereupon is indirect at best. Seems to me he's just indignant about having to pay a tax.

And I can kind of see his point, since he's writing from an America that has one hell of a lot less in the way of infrastructure, the primary justification for why our current tax system is necessary. But all this talk of the outdoorsy individual having no need of an overbearing government rings a little hollow, seeing as Thoreau didn't get much further into the wilderness than a few miles from Boston. He was a few decades younger than Daniel Boone: now there's someone who meant it.