Why Do This?

Recently, while visiting Audrius in that cursed prison, we were discussing the current immigration situation. For obvious reasons that is most of what we talk about since he was taken by ICE. I was saying something . . . don't even remember what, when suddenly he started to laugh and said, "You like this too much." He is glad to have a friend who values him enough to extend such effort to bring him home, but that's not going to keep him from teasing me when given the opportunity. Actually, he understands where my passion for any and every human rights battle that I've ever gotten myself into comes from (and there have been many), but most people who know me don't, so let's set the record straight. The general opinion is that I am doing this for some selfless reason - that I do this for the people for whose rights I fight. WRONG! Nothing could be further for the truth. I do this for me - to protect myself and my future - and it is because I know that I do it for me that I have so much passion to give to it.

In the essay "The Ethics of Emergencies" Ayn Rand states: "The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity. Integriy is loyalty to one's convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one's values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality."

When I defend the human rights of any oppressed group I am operating on that principle. We are all interconnected in this world. To think otherwise would require a deliberate refusal to observe what is happening right in front of us. What happens to some child in Sudan can ultimately impact my own life, usually in ways that I will never know.

If you do not believe that, consider the case of Charles Richard Drew, the black man who was a pioneer in the preservation of blood for blood banks. His research and developments saved thousands of lives during WWII, yet he encountered immense racial injustice in his life. Fortunately a number of people stepped in and assisted him as a young man, stood up for his rights as a human being. They didn't know what he was to become, they just knew he was a person and deserved to be treated decently. If any of those individuals had turned their back, had looked the other way at a critical moment, thinking it was inconvenient to take on the powerful Jim Crow laws of that time or that his problems were not their problems, this man's life might well have taken a different path. Of course, the preservation of blood for blood banks would have been developed eventually, but not in time for those men who were saved by it in WWII and how many of us would that have affected in the end? There is no way to know as the ways in which each life impacts each other life are impossible to measure.

When we oppress some group that we perceive as being different from ourselves and thereby somehow "less" or "weaker" than we are, we oppress ourselves. The people who oppressed blacks in the time of Charles Richard Drew were doing everything within their power to prevent people like him from reaching their full potential. In his case the white supremacists who fought against the rights and equality of blacks were doing everything they could to prevent this young man from saving lives - the lives of our families and our friends. They were actively committing covert murder and they had murder in their heart - I promise you that. Look in the eyes of any full-blown racist in mid rant . . . I have done that many times . . . and I assure you, you will see the heart and soul of a criminal. This is the stuff of which holocausts, genocides and the like are made on an mass scale, but it is also the agent of death and destruction on a much more sinister and less easily seen level. Their intention is to destroy and that intention knows no boundaries. If they succeed, then my own life could be put in jeopardy and so I fight . . . against them . . . and for human rights for all mankind. And if at times it seems I become a little shrill, a little obsessive - it is because I know . . . I am fighting for my life!