IX
Ultimately, one will not be able to ignore plain, obvious cruelty that shows itself in one’s immediate presence. A person makes a psychic accommodation to it, walks away, averts his or her eyes … or a person ‘gets up’.
No one can predict which one he or she will be. Circumstances show us what we are.
Those who ‘get up’ respond to a kind of moral emergency. Something inside them feels injustice. Their action does not begin as an internal dialectic. It begins as an unthinking response – an ardor, an anger, linked to pity, linked to a core certitude about right and wrong. It reveals a stubborn confidence in their own self-worth and judgment. It is defiant but not arrogant. These people have the strength to say NO when they are alone.
X
Collective action in opposition to cruelty can be effective. Witness the good works of the ASPCA, Amnesty International, and the Council of Europe Anti-Torture Commitee. These are examples of long existing organizations whose purpose is to draw attention to cruelty and to take actions that will end it.
Collective action against cruelty often requires a physical risk of injury, even death. Those men and women and children who marched against segregation and white supremacy in the South were beaten, mauled by dogs, thrown against walls by the pressurized streams of fire hoses. Some were murdered.
Individuals enter these collectives by choice. Some force inside them is galvanized by their witness of cruelty. I’m not sure what to call that force – goodness is too nebulous a word, kindness too soft a description of the will required to say No and act upon that No.
However, these individuals come to it, through religious belief or secular principle, they are able to recognize whomever or whatever is suffering as connected to themselves, a connection that feels deeper than empathy. Maybe we see a divine spark. Maybe we just cannot take the screams. I’m not sure any word can properly express that web of associations by which we make strangers in agony into brothers and sisters, by which we transform tormented animals into beings, not creatures but beings, who have a right to not be in pain. Whatever it is, it exists. In many this force abides, quiet, unspoken, perhaps even unaware, and in more of us in the right circumstances, it asserts itself and says No. It says, I have to get up. It says I must do something to stop this. Now.
