Imagine a man in the eighteenth century, a man in Virginia. Autumn in Virginia is lovely, the heat easing, the air less humid. This man is quite wealthy and stands on the front porch of his brick home between white Grecian pillars, looking off toward a stand of trees. He imagines the tallest, his favorite, a tree he specifically declared exempt from the wood clearing needed to build his home – not unlike Jefferson’s home, a few miles away.
That tree, he says to himself, is the one. I shall tell the British commander so. That tree is the tree from which I shall be hung.
He thinks these thoughts because three months earlier, in July, he’d signed a document that effectively declared war on the British, to whom – according to the British – Virginia belonged. Along with about 50 others, this man signed a longish declaration that ended with these words: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
If the Americans lost – and odds were in fact against them – certainly he and the other signers would be killed for treason.
We wonder how a man like this made his decision to sign that document. He had so much to lose. The very leadership and visibility that made each of the signers important to the cause made their own potential sacrifices all the more extraordinary.
We bear this in mind as we look over the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. When do you cross your home’s threshold to protest? When is it safe? When ought we do such a thing even if it is not safe? We now see, displayed on the stage of geopolitical theater, all of these questions playing out, with every possible answer played out as well. How fortunate the Tunisians who leapt into the fray as victory was at hand. How awful for the Libyans, thinking of victory in days or weeks, now digging in for a long battle, wondering about the taste of nerve gas, or the smell of napalm.
We note as well this weekend’s New York Times magazine article about Lori Berenson, the young American (now 40) who went to El Salvador and Nicaragua to join the revolutions in those countries, journeyed on to Peru, and found herself in Peruvian prisons for the last 16 years.
Jennifer Egan reports in the Times that Berenson’s brief tenure as a student at MIT led her to her life’s work:
-She began working for Prof. Martin Diskin, who was doing research on the policies of granting political asylum to -refugees from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. She learned that those who received asylum were likely to be the -ones fleeing groups that the United States opposed: the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, or the guerrillas fighting -in El Salvador.
-“The others would get sent back to be killed, even though they had been tortured,” she told me. “Why wouldn’t you -give someone who’s being pursued refugee status? Politics. My awakening to the world.”
-Berenson spoke of this revelation with a forceful clarity I rarely heard in discussions of her personal experience, -which she tends to minimize. Her political views, expressed in periodic statements from prison that her parents -posted on their FreeLori.org Web site, haven’t measurably changed over the years; on the contrary, her discovery of -a world built on oppression, exploitation and imperialism has — in Berenson’s view — been ratified by her experience -in Peru. “I realized that behind suffering was politics. It wasn’t just like, Oh, these people are poor and they’re destined -to suffer. No. There are interests behind that — political, economic — in having a social class be relegated to dying in -misery, and being exploited, and being harmed, and suffering repression.”
Berenson may be wrong in her analysis, but if so only as a matter of degree. If “interests” are not wholly behind poverty, surely these interests are at least present, often substantially so, and at times decisive – here as well as there, we are prepared to argue.
The questions that matter most are when and how to stand up and note these injustices, when and how to respond, and how to make one’s own sacrifices mean more than therapy or autobiography.
The.American.Word. 