What's the issue?

Howard Zinn, a political science professor and social activist who campaigned against war is quoted as saying "Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it." I can only understand this comment in the light of cruel and exasperating treatment from a government or oppressive power. Changing municipal boundaries does not fit into this category. Or does it? Am I missing something here?

So I began to educate myself some more and found that Henry David Thoreau supported this ideal in his quote here, "If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law." Unfortunately in Sasolburg there has been no injustice, just the perception of a possible injustice. I still say bring in the army, if we still have one.

Bob wails on, "How many rivers do we have to cross, Before we can talk to the boss? Eh! All that we got, it seems we have lost; We must have really paid the cost." I shudder to think what our country would look like if everybody who felt an injustice took to looting and violence. Ouch.

And just as I began to see that maybe there was some reason, some logic to violent civil disobedience, I came across a quote by George F. Kennan "If you accept a democratic system, this means that you are prepared to put up with those of its workings, legislative or administrative, with which you do not agree as well as with those that meet with your concurrence. This willingness to accept, in principle, the workings of a system based on the will of the majority, even when you yourself are in the minority, is simply the essence of democracy. Without it there could be no system of representative self-government at all. When you attempt to alter the workings of the system by means of violence or civil disobedience, this, it seems to me, can have only one of two implications; either you do not believe in democracy at all and consider that society ought to be governed by enlightened minorities such as the one to which you, of course, belong; or you consider that the present system is so imperfect that it is not truly representative, that it no longer serves adequately as a vehicle for the will of the majority, and that this leaves, to the unsatisfied, no adequate means of self-expression other than the primitive one of calling attention to themselves and their emotions by mass demonstrations and mass defiance of established authority."

Now I'm really confused.