The Opposite of Right

After many many days of consistent posting, I found myself at a loss for anything to blog about in the last couple of days. I looked at the drafts with nuggets for posts but none of them were anything I really felt like saying at the moment. But, I think I finally hit upon what it is that has been trying to crawl out of my fingers and into the keyboard. And I think it all started with Valkyrie.

Watching Valkyrie made me consider the lives of the men and women who actually decided to do the unthinkable: kill Hitler.  It also made me think about all the men and women who did absolutely nothing.  But probably the hardest thing in the movie to swallow is when Col. Stauffenberg tells his wife that, if the plan doesn’t work,  “they” will come after her and the children.  On one hand, it’s almost unthinkable and inexcusable for someone to put his family in that kind of danger, but when you consider the task he had at hand and what he was willing to sacrifice to see it come about, it gives you an idea of the enormity of the commitment he was taking on.

The inevitability of thought process made me wonder if I would be capable of the same thing.  Despite my warlike hobbies, I’m not really in favor of killing anyone and I’m really not in favor of anyone that I love dying, especially because of something I did.  So, there must be something that sets apart these men and women who participated in the Valkyrie plot and it took me a while to nail down what it is: they were willing to live inconvenient and uncomfortable lives.

Now that might not be a grand revelation to anyone else, but it really made me think.  What separated Stauffenberg and his crew from all the rest is that they were willing to risk their day-to-day life because they believed so strongly that what they had to do was the right thing.  The rest of Germany was willing to put up with Hitler and the SS and the Nazi party if it meant they could be left generally alone to do what they wish.  The second that you put yourself publicly at odds with Hitler and co., you could expect your life to, at the very least, become more difficult or, more likely, end.

This took me back to something I had read a couple months ago that stood out so much that it made my Facebook “Favorite Quotes” section.  In a letter column in the back of Amazing Spider-Man there was a letter from a guy named Nathan from Jackson, TN responding to a recent issue that focused on Spidey’s pal Flash Thompson and his service with the Marines in Iraq.  It was a very powerful issue and it stirred some emotions, especially in Nathan who wrote this:

Thank you, the ones who’ve gone before you, and the ones who will come after, for believing it *is* important to do the right thing for the right reasons, and that it gets more important as it gets harder to do them.

That quote really gets to the heart of what I saw in Valkyrie.  The more you stand to lose, the harder it is to do something.  That’s when people expect you to give in or give up, to let things slide, to take the easy road out.  But it’s at that time that it’s so much more important that the right thing is more important than the convenient thing.  We have a name for people who can make those decisions: heroes.

Continued contemplation of these ideas produced a thesis of sorts: The opposite of right is wrong, but the enemy of right is convenience.  Good people may not do the wrong thing, but they will do the convenient thing.

It’s unfortunate that this has to be true, because it doesn’t need to be this way.  Look at the history of the United States, we are a country built by people who did the inconvenient thing.  From the Declaration of Independence to the Emancipation Proclamation, we had a track record of doing the right thing for the right reasons and living with the not-always-fun results.  But the 20th century?  I’m not so sure.  Everyone expects me to cite the nobility of WWII here, but let’s be honest here, the war didn’t start on December 7th, 1941.  It started years before that and the U.S. did its best to ignore the war until it showed up on the doorstop in Pearl Harbor.  Same thing with WWI.  And Vietnam?  I don’t even know how to touch that one.

So, what changed?  Well, one example is my microwave.  The designers of my microwave thankfully understood the preciousness of my time and realized that hitting 1-0-0 is entirely way too many keystrokes to make my oatmeal delicious.  So, all I have to do is press 1 and, voila, it cooks my breakfast for 1 minute exactly.  What I’m getting at here is that, as a society, we don’t worry about what’s going on around us because inside our homes and jobs life is convenient and comfortable.  Maybe not for everyone, but a huge chunk of us for sure.  Our attention has turned from where our next meal is coming from to self-checkout at grocery stores. Technology has taken the sharp edges off of life and we’re fine with that.

It’s not like me to harp on the shortcomings of our society or be generally pessimistic.  And I’m not.  Why?  Because a society is made up of individuals and we have great examples of individuals who have sacrificed so much.  On Monday we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. day and it’s no secret what he gave up in his work for equality.  In fact, the whole Civil Rights movement is filled with those individuals.

And maybe just as important, our entertainment hasn’t failed us (let me finish my thought, you judgemental jerk).  It may have taken 27.5 years for me to get it, but all of my favorite stories are about these ideas: the young moisture farmer leaving home to save the princess; the brother and sisters exploring a strange land for their lost brother*; the little folks who carry a ring into the realm of evil to destroy it; the boy with the irradiated spider bite who gives up the things he wants most because of the burden of his responsibility to do the right thing.  These stories may be fighting for the spotlight from the antihero and deconstruction, but they’re there and always have been there.  Like it or not, these stores are our modern mythology, these are the stories that socialize us.  And it gives me hope to know that two of these stories can steal the box office in 2008.

The best way to end this post is probably just to say what Nathan from Jackson, TN said: thank you to those who have done the right things for the right reasons, no matter how hard it got or how much you had to give up to do it.  May my life and all the lives that come after you be lives marked not by convenience, but by steadfastness to what is right.

* – No, this does not refer to The Battle for Endor.

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