This is a question I posed to my 9th grade students last week while we were studying the Civil Rights movment. It was inspired by those who put themselves at risk, whether it was Jim Zweig from Madison Wisconsin, the white man who was first off the Freedom Riders' bus, and almost died as a result, to seeing Rev. Fred Shuttleworth getting pounded for trying to register his daughter in a white school in Birmingham, to the fire hoses and police dogs to seeing the Alabama State troopers beating on John Lewis and others at the Edmund Pettis Bridge.
I have earlier today written a diary that touches on this. One of the comments suggested that I put this question in a separate diary and encourage responses. So I have,.
But as I noted in the aforementioned diary, sometimes the real issue is not so much the diying, but for what would we be willing to surrender or risk that which is most precious for us, which in my case is my teaching career. I have already taken that decision with some of my other posts -- for the principles by which I hope to live.
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Let me offer my own very tentative answers.
Although I am more oriented towareds pacifism in this stage of my life, and prefer non-violent conflict resolution, I assure my students that I will do all in my power to keep them phsyically safe. Given that I teach in the district where the DC snipers shot a middle schooler, this is an issue for some of my students. I would violate my own principles to keep them safe.
But if you demand that I kill another human being, say in the miltiary, or because you will torture me, then I will say go ahead and kill me or torture me. The decision to take another life is not one you can impose on me.
I am willing to interpose myself into situations of violence in the hope that I can calm it -- unlike many teachers, I still break up fights. I realize that I might get hurt or killed in such a situation, but I refuse to stand by and let a person get beaten to a pulp.
But these are, at least for me, easy situations.
Would I have the courage of Mother Maria of Paris, a Russian Orthodox nun, who in a concentration camp stepped forward to offer herself so another would not be killed? I do not know.
Would I risk my teaching career to speak out when I believe my country is wrong? The answer to that is clearly yes, because otherwise I could not teach by example what I believe to be important. How could I make sense, for example, of the sacrifice of those in the Civil Rights movement, or of those who opposed Joseph McCarthy, or the early protestors to the war in Vietnam, were I unwilling to live up to such principles.
I do not know the answer to my questions. And I doubt that I will ever have a final answer. I know that my wife and I have, since she visited my classes on Friday, been discussing in depth what it means to live by the principles we espouse. This is but one question among many, an important one.
So how do other Kossacks react?