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> For all the influence exerted by people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., they effected change with their lives, and not their deaths. I would

> For all the influence exerted by people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., they effected change with their lives, and not their deaths. I would argue the most important changes they affected were for themselves. You don't risk your health by helping someone who gets attacked to earn their gratitude, but to be able to look in the mirror. That's the only thing that gives enough energy to sustain certain things for years and decades. And Rosa Parks for example didn't plan to end segregation, she was sick of putting up with it. Nothing more, nothing less. How great other people are in your eyes is does not matter for what value their own acts of moral hygiene have to them, and people don't need "expect" a reward for such things because the deed itself IS the reward. They already have it. And since you brought up MLK: I say to you this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you aren't willing to die for it then you aren't fit to live. [..] You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOjpaIO2seY&t=18m26s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOjpaIO2seY&t=18m26s > In a society of equals, for anyone to die unnecessarily is a tragedy. For someone to choose to die, it is a horror. Here's a secret: everybody dies, either way. The only choice you have is how you live. From John J. Chapman's commencement address to the graduating class of Hobart College, 1900: If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners. > It is not fitting to convince anyone to believe they are so unworthy that the best way they might serve others is by throwing themselves into fires that need never have been lit. People who are great don't need to be convinced of anything. People who aren't are impossible to convince. And it's not "fitting" to justify stoking fires because otherwise others would do it, either. Then let those others do it? And hey, for all you know, they all might be doing it because otherwise you would do it. And who is actually sacrificing? People who aren't sacrificing their ideals and their morals, or people who sacrifice them for some food and a few decades more?

logfromblammo 11y ago
"If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon." — Bokonon (aka Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle) Just because I mentioned specific individuals does not mean that I agree with them. I only acknowledge that they produced an effect that propagated beyond their own deaths through the actions of the devotees they acquired while living. I might also have mentioned prophets of various religions, though I may not follow any of them. Skilled as I am at seeing the fnords, in the MLK address you quoted, under the obvious text, lies this subtext: Is my cause not great enough that you might be willing to die for it? If you are not, and have no greater cause to hold your loyalty, then you are more a walking corpse than a living man, and unworthy of my regard. It is very similar to "Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." It is a recruiting speech. And every time a young black person gets "the talk", it is contradicted. According to MLK, every time black kids submerge their will in a police encounter, and come away from it alive, but humiliated, they will be dead inside until their bodies finally catch up. According to me, they will live long enough to either vote in comprehensive reform or to organize and rebel from a dearth of it. Nonviolent resistance depends in whole upon the oppressors' general unwillingness to murder nonviolent protesters. Willingness to die only works insofar as the opposition is unwilling to kill. Gandhi's protests worked only because British forces in India were unwilling to massacre Indians wholesale. MLK's protests worked only because the segregationists were unwilling to kill in public, before the typewriters and cameras of nationally-published journalists. If you are willing to die, and the other is willing to kill you, you would be prudent to arrange your affairs in advance, such that other people are positioned to impose meaningful consequences as a result. Otherwise, you are gifting your enemy with a tiny victory. If you quit a job in the military-industrial complex for which you have some ethical concerns, such as one which enables dragnet surveillance, what is the meaningful consequence? Every failing of the project in recent months is scapegoated to you. The contractor hires a replacement butt-in-seat. The work goes on. Your sacrifice yields nothing. No one rises in gratitude to pay your bills. When you mention in job interviews that you left due to ethical conflicts with the former employer, you never seem to be a good "cultural fit". Why then would anyone choose to do that? I'll take the food and the decades. I won't go willingly to my grave, if doing so wouldn't be more meaningful than what I believe I could accomplish with the entire remainder of my natural life. Sometimes, you can't avoid it, but you should always try to not die as you work towards your goals. Don't fear death, but don't ask it out on romantic dates, either.

logfromblammo 11y ago

"If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon." — Bokonon (aka Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle) Just because I mentioned specific individuals does not mean that I agree with them. I only acknowledge that they produced an effect that propagated beyond their own deaths through the actions of the devotees they acquired while living. I might also have mentioned prophets of various religions, though I may not follow any of them. Skilled as I am at seeing the fnords, in the MLK address you quoted, under the obvious text, lies this subtext: Is my cause not great enough that you might be willing to die for it? If you are not, and have no greater cause to hold your loyalty, then you are more a walking corpse than a living man, and unworthy of my regard. It is very similar to "Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." It is a recruiting speech. And every time a young black person gets "the talk", it is contradicted. According to MLK, every time black kids submerge their will in a police encounter, and come away from it alive, but humiliated, they will be dead inside until their bodies finally catch up. According to me, they will live long enough to either vote in comprehensive reform or to organize and rebel from a dearth of it. Nonviolent resistance depends in whole upon the oppressors' general unwillingness to murder nonviolent protesters. Willingness to die only works insofar as the opposition is unwilling to kill. Gandhi's protests worked only because British forces in India were unwilling to massacre Indians wholesale. MLK's protests worked only because the segregationists were unwilling to kill in public, before the typewriters and cameras of nationally-published journalists. If you are willing to die, and the other is willing to kill you, you would be prudent to arrange your affairs in advance, such that other people are positioned to impose meaningful consequences as a result. Otherwise, you are gifting your enemy with a tiny victory. If you quit a job in the military-industrial complex for which you have some ethical concerns, such as one which enables dragnet surveillance, what is the meaningful consequence? Every failing of the project in recent months is scapegoated to you. The contractor hires a replacement butt-in-seat. The work goes on. Your sacrifice yields nothing. No one rises in gratitude to pay your bills. When you mention in job interviews that you left due to ethical conflicts with the former employer, you never seem to be a good "cultural fit". Why then would anyone choose to do that? I'll take the food and the decades. I won't go willingly to my grave, if doing so wouldn't be more meaningful than what I believe I could accomplish with the entire remainder of my natural life. Sometimes, you can't avoid it, but you should always try to not die as you work towards your goals. Don't fear death, but don't ask it out on romantic dates, either.