Acts of courage: Sophie Scholl
We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. - Leaflet 4, the White Rose
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On February 18, 1943, University of Munich undergraduate Sophie Scholl was arrested in the atrium of the school for distributing anti-war flyers urging Germans to resist the Nazis nonviolently. Horrified by the stories her soldier fiancé and medical student brother had told her about Nazi atrocities, she had joined a small resistance group called the White Rose, started by her brother and several of his friends. The group put out five inflammatory leaflets exhorting Germans to reject fascism and militarism in favor of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, democracy, and the rule of law. Sophie and her brother Hans were caught placing stacks of the sixth leaflet in the empty hallways, where students would find them when they came out of their classes.
After four days of interrogation during which she refused ample opportunity to betray her co-conspirators, Sophie was convicted of treason in a show trial that lasted less than an hour. She was sentenced to death and executed before nightfall. She was all of 21.
In Germany, Sophie and Hans Scholl are considered among the greatest of heroes; in 2003, a national poll placed the Scholl siblings among the top five most important Germans of all time. Here in the US, they’re not nearly as well-known. I had never heard of them until this weekend, when I watched the extraordinary German-language film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Although it’s not a documentary, most of the dialogue is drawn directly from transcripts of Sophie’s interrogations and trial and interviews with surviving people who knew her. It made me shudder with admiration for this ordinary girl and the extraordinary end of her life.
The members of the White Rose were students — barely more than kids, all in their early 20s — and one professor. And in a time and place when people were arrested and harshly punished not just for their own words, but for their friends’ and families’, too, they dared to speak out, knowing they might die for it.
Could you be that brave? Could I?
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (5)Oh no they didn’t
Oh yes, they did.
The advocates of Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage in the state of California, argued in court last week that the reason Teh Gays shouldn’t be allowed to get married is because they can’t make babies.
You can probably tell that this is a bit of a hot button for me. Just as I bristle at the retro (but still out there!) idea that none of a woman’s other accomplishments matter unless and until she has a wedding ring, I’m infuriated by the notion that a relationship only has meaning and value if it includes children. It’s no huge secret that I’m childfree, or childless by choice, or however you prefer to refer to it — I use both terms interchangeably — and I would still very much like to find a partner with whom to build a shared life. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll call that shared life “marriage.” But by the logic of the Prop. 8 supporters, I don’t deserve all the legal benefits and protections of marriage, because I’m audaciously shirking my reproductive duty.
This notion, of course, has a long and ancient pedigree. Back in Imperial Rome, for example, citizens were supposed to knock up their wives within a year of the wedding. It was your duty to populate and spread the empire, and if you didn’t meet your quota with one spouse, it was your duty to find another and try, try again. In fact, if a couple couldn’t produce an actual or incipient baby by their first anniversary, the authorities had the right to declare the marriage null and void, if they so chose — and they often (though not always) did so choose.
We do not, however, live in Imperial Rome. Nor do we live in Elizabethan England, where Shakespeare’s bachelor Benedick succumbed reluctantly to love in Much Ado About Nothing while admitting, “The world must be peopled!” The world is plenty peopled by now — maybe even a bit too much so. More to the point, though, what are the opponents of gay marriage actually saying with their argument? Are they going to force my friends struggling with infertility to split up? Are they going to forbid weddings between people who are past childbearing age? How about women with health conditions that would make pregnancy dangerous? And what about those of us who don’t want kids?
Do they really want to return marriage to its true original intent, a license to breed? Because if you take the “marriage is about making babies” argument to its logical extreme, no marriage license would be issued without proof that the bride was pregnant. And that would require premarital sex. Which — oops! — right-wing religionists also oppose. Although I’m sure they’d find some way to justify it.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (3)The challenge of forgiveness
Let me set up a hypothetical situation for you.
Someone does something really crappy to you. It doesn’t involve torture, bloodshed, or imminent danger to life or limb — but it’s not a minor annoyance, either. Think cheating, stealing, lying to or about you, that kind of thing. To make matters worse, it’s done by someone you thought you had every reason to trust. And when you say, “Hey, what the hell,” this person you trusted plays the “you made me do it” card.
What do you do? Unless you’re a saint, you get mad, and you probably stay that way for a good long while. But then what?
To some extent, this is a universal experience. It’s probably not hypothetical to you. It’s not hypothetical to me.
To add insult to injury, someone who took advantage of my trust has noticed that I made the best of the betrayal, and now points to that as proof that it wasn’t actually that bad and, in fact, might even be considered as having done me a favor.
What do I do? I’m not a saint. I got mad. I’ve stayed that way for a good long while. But now what?
Because the thing is, I’m starting to realize that my anger is no longer serving me. Oh, it did at first. It gave me the strength to stand up for myself, to put an end to the bad behavior, and to say, “Do not do that again, or else.” But now my anger is becoming counterproductive.
It doesn’t make me feel better. It doesn’t undo the past. It doesn’t even elicit an apology; if anything, the other person has used it as an excuse to justify a lack of regret. Worse yet, rage keeps me perpetually frozen in the painful and infuriating moment that I discovered someone I trusted was entirely untrustworthy. As long as I continue feeling it, I continue defining myself as a victim — and more than that, I continue berating myself for not having known, somehow, that I needed to protect myself. That’s corrosive, even more damaging to me in the long run than the original betrayal.
And so I find myself wrestling with the terrifying concept of forgiveness. Yes, terrifying. I know continuing to be good and mad (understandable though it might be) is, as the saying goes, “drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” But my fear is that without it, I have no way to protect myself against a repeat performance.
That’s why I wish I could erase the phrase “forgive and forget” from the language. I think it does us all a huge disservice; it implies that forgiveness equals defenselessness. Forgiving bad behavior — or to phrase it in a way I’m more comfortable with, letting go of anger about it — doesn’t mean accepting it. As a wise friend recently said to me, “You can forgive a scared dog for biting you, but that doesn’t mean you have to let it bite you again.”
If I let go of my anger, am I excusing being treated poorly, or worse yet, agreeing that it was appropriate? Does forgiveness mean I have to pretend it never happened? Does it obligate me to give the other person the chance to hurt me again in exactly the same way?
No. No. And no.
Once you move an untrustworthy person to the periphery of your life, where he can’t do you any further damage, you no longer need the weapon of anger to protect you. Letting go of it is about switching perspective from “things to run away from” to “things to run toward.”
I don’t know precisely how to do that. But I know it’s necessary. And I know it’s possible.
What are your thoughts on forgiveness?
Filed under fears, progress | Comments (10)