brainwidth

sigh

I was reading the Daily Dish - as best I could on my phone - and a coworker asked what I was looking at. I showed her the tweets from Iran and told her how bad things were getting there. Devastating, really.

She said “I don’t understand. Why don’t these people just go home? They know how bad it is. They know they are out there with guns and stuff ready to kill them. Just go home and forget about it.”

I said, “Then who is going to do this? If they stop now, no one will ever take a stand again. It would be a greater defeat for everyone to turn around and go home than for them to kill everyone.”

She looked at me like I’d lost my head. ”But they are going out there knowing they could be killed.”

“Yes, they are.”

“It seems like a stupid thing to do.”

And I told her, in so many words, it only seems like a stupid thing to do when you are sitting at a cubicle in the United States, eating McDonald’s, having just complained that the most difficult choice you’re facing today is whether to send out for pizza or Chinese tonight. It seems stupid because you have not been oppressed. It seems stupid because you don’t know enough about it.

“Why get yourself killed over this? These people are so young. Let someone else do it.”

“Who else is going to do it? If not now, when?”

“This is why we need to go to war with Iran. We’ll take care of it for them. We’ll bomb the hell out of that country and they won’t have to worry about protests anymore. Obama needs to take military action.”

I sigh. A deep, almost sarcastic sigh. “Your McDonald’s is getting cold.”

I was thinking about the same thing a day or two ago. Things looked like they’d settled down a little and I was kind of depressed - sad that it seemed like people had given up. And then I thought, would I be willing to go out and die if I were in that situation? I don’t know. I’d like to think I would, but it’s easy for me to say “yes, this thing on the other side of the globe is worth people sacrificing their lives for” because of my distance both physically and condition-wise. But what that should do for me is make me even more aware of the sacrifices the people who do think it’s worthwhile, and to think of them as heroic and hope, even if I don’t think it’s likely, that what they’re doing will make a difference and change things.

Source: openareas