Except they only won because UK was too busy spending money on a way to stop the French.

Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents.

That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.

I meant more that we wouldn't have the Bill of Rights if it wasn't for Patrick Henry.

There is a super interesting and complicated discussion to have about the pragmatics and morality of concerted military action versus stochastic civil violence. Unfortunately, thread conditions on HN aren't conducive to it; the discussion will instantly devolve (via people joining in) to valence arguments about the cause of this or that campaign of violence. I genuinely think you'd need a moderation regime designed from the ground up to support a productive conversation about this topic, which, for good reasons, HN doesn't provide.

Honestly, it's not really that complicated. Americans (at least Pennsylvanians) born before, say 2000 were explicitly taught that violence is ok if it's against tyranny. Apparently, they stopped teaching that after 2010, so we're now in a post-natural-rights era.

I went to high school in Pennsylvania.

We went to different high schools in the 1990s, because that isn't at all what I was taught.

While I typically avoid touching non-technical topics, I have the opportunity to chime in as another PA highschooler from the 90's, we absolutely were taught that, down to details in AP courses such as the impact of individuals like John Brown. While I'm not sure I'd have worded it precisely like the parent, the concept of "the four boxes of liberty" and the progression thereof was certainly understood and conveyed. (There was substantial study of the labor rights movements and conflicts/resistance therein as well)

I went to Jesuit high school in Chicago in the early 1990s. There's a lot more to say about all of this stuff and nothing wrong with what you just said, but to hash it out any further, we'd have to attempt a philosophical discussion about violence in a forum that (unavoidably, and to the consternation of its moderators) has reward circuits wired around hyping up action.

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” has been a popular quote in the US for a long time.