Human(e) Choices

[browngirl]

I completely managed to miss Blog Against Torture day until it happened/was over, but otoh I can't think of anything I would have said that hasn't been said by others and better too. One of the posts I found particularly notable was written by lyonesse, who reminds us that "people, by which i mean practically everybody, are capable of performing torture and not at all difficult to persuade to do so. see stanley milgram, or darfur, or rwanda, or the schoolyard."

I'm not going to let myself go on very long, but... every so often I do something like learn a new horrifying fact (frex, I was reading about WWII recently. I don't want to remember what I learned this time) and then wonder what I would do, what everyone around me would do. If an officer of the government asked me for a list of all the students of a particular ethnicity at the school where I work, what would I do? If Christianity started recovering its more-or-less mandatory status, or became flat-out mandatory, what would my Christian friends do? If the government decided to imprison people of my ethnicity, which of my friends would try to hide me and which give me up? If they started on another group, how far, if at all, would I help people from that group? Would I risk my safety? Would I risk that of my small roommates?

The only answer I have is that assuming that being a "good person" means one will automatically make the good choice, that one doesn't have to worry about such matters... I'm not very old, I haven't read much, but as far as I can see, when the chips are down such assumptions are one of the first things to be disproven.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

That not everyone will be a good person in a tight situation, is pretty unarguable; I choose rather to look at it as there being plenty of evidence that not everybody won't be, either. As a local acquaintance of relevant descent pointed out, one thing about living where we do is that for a large number of people this is the place the Underground Railroad went to.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I choose rather to look at it as there being plenty of evidence that not everybody won't be, either

Oh, this is a really good point. I didn't post this to say that everyone *would* go bad, just that... I'm frustrated by the people who blithely dismiss any thoughts of what they might do by saying "I'm a good person, I won't do anything bad."

[ailbhe]

Yeah, I have NO IDEA how much danger I'd put my children in, and how corrupt I'd become to keep them safe. None.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*nod* Yeah. I look at Joshua and Eva, and, yeah. And they aren't even *my* children, you know? How much more would any parent do?

[fitfool.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid I used to play little neighborhood war games. Did you watch Toy Story? There was the scene when the little toy soldiers are marching off on their mission and one of them gets injured and he bravely tells the others to go on without him. And of course the others will have none of that and drag their wounded buddy to safety. We'd role-play all kinds of heroic scenarios like that. As I got older, I found that in my own private imagination, my fantasized roles of playing the hero were more like these situations you described. I would imagine that I was Schindler and harboring a whole factory full of people from persecution. Or that I was unsuspected leader of an Underground railroad that ferried people to safety. Or better yet, that I was the suspected leader of an underground railroad that managed to dodge capture. I wonder if any kids out there play games like that? For me, they didn't start occurring to me until I was older and so they've just been my own little Walter Mitty fantasies. I haven't been in that situtation and I hope that I never do have to face anything like that. But if I were there, I hope I'd have the courage I like to imagine myself to have.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

This comment made me beam, you know; thank you for telling me this. And I remember that bit from Toy Story. :D

[ssha.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a Quaker, I can firmly say that I would both be Christian, and would protect you. Quakers were the major factor in implementing and running the Underground Railroad, because God's Law (of Love for One Another above all) supercedes any law man can make that might contradict it.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*nod* I remember admiring Quakers from when I was very young, for that reason.

(And, thank you.)

[ssha.livejournal.com]

You are more than welcome. :)