Somebody asked me the other day if I ever learn anything here. I told the truth, I learn things everywhere I go, offline or online, and most times, what I learn makes a significant contribution to my knowledge of the immensity of my ignorance.
I learned something today, thanks to bughouse canuck, who pointed out one of those very simple truths that are in front of your face, but unnoticed. Or at least it has been unnoticed by me.
The context was the heroism of Miss Rosa Parks, for those who don’t want to click and read the whole thing, here is bughouse canuck’s money line:
who’s going to dare to think they could be a hero? Let us see the truth, that you can do things with the support of a movement that you could never do alone, and our heroes will spring up.
Now that really made me think.
I knew that there are children who do not know who Miss Rosa is, there are children who do not know a lot of things about the civil rights movement in the US, but I did not realize that the organization and planning behind her courageous act had been suppressed.
I did not realize that there are people who sincerely believe that it somehow takes away from the historic and even moral value of Miss Rosa’s “NO” to discuss all the brave acts of the many people, most of whose names and faces are not known, who went out into the woods and cut wood, carefully chopped it and stacked it to be ready for the spark.
Are there people, even Americans, who do not know what it was like to be non-white in the US, especially the southern US in 1955?
Have so many people, black, white, and every shade in between, failed to tell their children and their grandchildren what it was like to live under apartheid?
Do they just gloss over it, tell them about Miss Rosa, and of course, Dr. King, as if this were some thing that just happened one day, that these brave people called the nation’s attention to it and it was promptly corrected?
bughouse’s observation that organization is scary makes sense if we are talking about governments and corporations, but has that view filtered down into the population, so that today, who dares to think they could be a hero?
Not just the hero that stands in front of the tank, but the hero who opens their home for the meeting, the hero who obtains a copy of the tank schedule, the hero who alerts the media, the hero who stacks the wood, ready for the spark.
Today, the organization is apparently so scary that when it is covered at all, it is demonized.
I haven’t seen a whole lot of TV coverage today about Cindy Sheehan. Having heard a couple of her speeches on C-span etc, I can see why. She may not have the telegenic charisma of Dr. King or Hugo Chavez, but she does not mince words. Instead of the startling beauty and quiet, regal bearing of Miss Rosa, Miss Cindy has the face and the bearing of the American soccer mom next door. And her rhetoric is not. Her speeches have the same no-nonsense tone one can imagine her using with Casey when he needed to be set straight, and sent over to the neighbor’s to offer to mow the lawn for free to pay for the ball-broken window.
Maybe that is why she is even scarier than the Montgomery NAACP, even scarier than her own “organization.”
It is hard not to look at her and think, hey, I could too dare to be a hero!
