If you've got ideas so compelling and rich that you choose to live according to them, I can only ask you to reconsider. They could actually end up costing you your life.
Not my sister's ideas. Those won't get her killed. No sirree. She lives in the United States in 2009, and no matter how locally unpopular her ideas are, the balance is weighted so heavily in her dissident favour that murdering her, on behalf of an individual or, worse, the state, would be seen as much more blasphemous than any blasphemy she could commit by sticking like mad, mad superglue to her crazy, crazy ideas.
Of course, my sister has no crazy ideas. She's a nurse, a mother of two rather sophisticated young adults and the wife of a hard-working, dedicated husband. She simply dared to speak her mind in the face of so much vitriolic disagreement in the low-key melees that sprung up all around her during the last US general election campaign.
The lunatic mother-woman stood there in the middle of Ohio and favoured Obama. Worse yet, she didn't care who knew it. Even so, she and I spent hours on the phone in the weeks leading up to the polling - so many hours that we were equally worried about making our mortgage payments when the bills arrived.
We spent that much time on the phone together because she was concerned - especially at the beginning of it all - that she had gone legitimately mad. Her family members (apart from me, but I'm clearly insane, so what of it?), some friends, people with whom she shared rides to work, people at work, her former in-laws and every nature of shopkeeper, beekeeper, newspaper delivery boy and local shepherd called her everything but white (which is technically incorrect and vastly irrelevant) upon discovery of the fact that she was in favour of the man who eventually became the 44th President of the United States becoming the 44th President of the United States.
Imagine the balls on the silly cow! But I oxymoronically digress.
My sister endured endless, pointless arguments, jibes, name-calling (really!) and accusations that consisted mainly of assertions that she was a terrorist. How on earth could she justify voting for one otherwise? She must be anti-America, anti-freedom, anti-Christian, etc., because she supported an anti-American etc. candidate. Of course, at the root of every one of these horrible diatribes was racism - and racism that wasn't very cheerfully tarted up at that.
Even so, if you go to the supermarket one day, and all the other shoppers tell you that red grapes are poisonous, there's a little part of you that doubts what you thought unassailable. Then you look at those grapes differently for the second or two before you slap yourself back to reality and put a bunch in your basket.
And so we talked and talked, reminding each other that it was better to be hopeful rather than nihilistic, hopeful rather than fearful, hopeful rather than racist. We talked and we talked and we talked, and no one killed us.
We're lucky, and I knew that. Until I watched the German film 'Sophie Scholl' a few days ago, I had only a rough idea of how incredibly lucky we are.
The film is a dramatic retelling of the arrest, trial and execution of Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and Christoph Probst, three Bavarian students who, as three-fifths of the White Rose, peacefully resisted the Nazis near the end of World War II using the written word and nothing else. They observed what was happening around them, bought a typewriter, paper and stamps, started telling the truth and paid with their lives. Sounds to me as though they were asking for it.
Many ordinary Germans were in the same two-holed boat but didn't have the spirit to proceed. They had lost the right to talk against the grain, and they were about to lose their country. The most rudimentary of moral codes had been replaced in an official capacity with an umbrella of despotic delusion in the face of the start of the decline of fascism in Europe, which is to say the fall of the Axis. That five students were able to cause so much trouble for the Nazis using a typewriter and the postal service is remarkable.
The timing for Sophie and her cohorts was pretty poor. Their only crime of course was doing what my sister and I were attempting to do on the phone: keep our heads while all around us seemed to be descending into madness.
In her final hour, which began the moment she was convicted of high treason, Sophie turned to god, as she had done her entire life. What she did not do was turn to religion. First, she prayed for the restoration of higher humanity:
"My god, glorious father, transform this ground into fertile earth, so your seeds may not fall in vain. Let the longing grow for you the creator that they so often do not want to see. Amen."
She then asked the attending minister for god's blessing. He assented, set his right hand gently on the top of her head and said,
"May god the father bless you, who created you in his image. May god the son bless you, whose suffering and death redeems you. May god the holy spirit bless you, who leads you to his temple and hallows you. May the trinity judge you with mercy and grant you eternal life. Amen."
Religious or not, spiritual or not, this seems right - a little bit of peace and forgiveness for having lived a human life.
The minister closed, 'No one loves more than one who dies for friends. God is with you."
As the executioners cuffed and led Sophie to the guillotine (yes, guillotine!), she turned to her brother and Probst and said, 'Die Sonne scheint noch.' The sun is still shining.
Sophie said nothing ever again, but just try to stop lucky me and my lucky, lucky sister.
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