Gratitude Monday: Visible decency

During the late 60s, there was a group of Friends who used to stand every Wednesday in front of the main post office building on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. They didn’t hand out leaflets or engage pedestrians; they didn’t shout or wave at passing cars. They stood silently around a sign protesting the war in Vietnam.

They were there every Wednesday for a few hours during the midday, week after week, month after month, for years.

I used to see them as I rode the bus home and wonder what they thought they could possibly accomplish against the freaking US government by just, you know, bearing witness. By being visibly silent and making people think. I mean—what the hell?

I was quite young, of course. I tended to think more in terms of only the obvious than I do now.

I mean, these days I sometimes find myself disappearing up my own intellect, trying to separate out the wheat from the chaff of world events, wondering what the hell happened to those ants that are supposed to help me with this. (And while I’m dreaming, where’s that sodding dwarf who’s supposed to spin all this straw into gold?)

So my mind has been turning back to people who, throughout history, have seen clearly enough and had the strength of character to quietly stand up—literally stand—and make their point without hauling out automatic weapons, engaging in abusive gasbaggery or expecting to get movie deals out of it.

I am so grateful that these people exist, because—although the odds are against them by a huge margin—they can and do change our world for the better. And they make me think about what I’m doing personally, and what I’m allowing my government to do.

I’ll give you a couple of examples, all women, as it happens.

Do you recall those women back in the 70s and 80s who gathered in front of Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, in Buenos Aires? They were mothers of los desaparacidos—the young people the regime had made disappear—and they defied repressive “anti-terrorism” laws to assemble and be seen at a time when most Argentinians were trying to not attract governmental attention.

This was the time of the Dirty War, and all the power rested in the hands of the military government. But these women kept appearing at Plaza de Mayo, demanding by their presence that someone account for their missing sons and daughters. Again and again they showed up in the heart of the (need I point out, male-dominated) Argentine business and political world; they would not be invisible. Not even when women from their ranks were also kidnapped and murdered.

By their actions they made the “disappeared” visible. Their only “weapon”, in fact, was their visibility, and the white headscarf was the symbol of their movement. That has been memorialized in Plaza de Mayo as a permanent reminder of the power of conscience and decency.

Eventually—after years and a change of government—graves of the desaparacidos were uncovered, and some of the tens of thousands of lost children were identified by DNA testing. Not by any means all, or probably even the majority; but still, massive steps forward, for the entire society; and all because these women insisted on being seen and heard.

Well, you say, but las madres had world press covering their marches. Easy to see how that effected change. Okay, but the women of Berlin didn’t have anything in their favor when they protested the arrest of their Jewish husbands by the Gestapo in 1943.

These were Aryan women whose husbands had been arrested as part of a roundup of Jews for deportation. You’d think that would be it, right? I mean, we’re talking one of the top two totalitarian regimes of the 20^th Century here. If ever there was a situation where the balance of power is 99.9999% on the side of the government, it would be Nazi Germany. And by 1943, the Nazis had held that power for ten years; there was no reason to think that they were at all assailable.

The men who’d been rounded up were being held at a Jewish community center on Rosenstraße, around the corner from Gestapo headquarters. To the Nazis it was a routine action—time to rid Berlin of all Jews, including the ones who’d previously served a purpose. But to the women, these men were their husbands.

It’s hard to imagine how it happened, because really, Nazi power was as close to absolute as it gets, and there was the same sort of innate desire to be invisible to authorities that existed in Argentina 35 years later. And yet, essentially the same thing happened: as wives realized where their husbands were being held, they showed up in ones and twos to demand their loved ones’ release. Until the street was filled with them.

In this instance, they were not silent; they shouted, they chanted, they cried. For a week, day and night, they stood in front of guards armed with automatic weapons, who periodically threatened to shoot if the women didn’t clear the street. This would work temporarily, but the wives never went far, and they kept coming back.

And finally, Joseph Goebbels decided that the best way to stop the protest would be to give the women what they wanted. Their husbands were released and they went home; most would survive the war. And here is their memorial at a nearby park.

Imagine that: a few hundred housewives who would not go home without their husbands triumph over armed Gestapo guards.

I think about the Plaza de Mayo mothers, and about the Rosenstraße wives—willing to put everything on the line to defy the most repressive regimes and to demand justice and decency.

And I think about the Quakers on Colorado Boulevard, willing to stand upright every Wednesday from January to December to remind their fellow citizens that we are the government and we have an obligation to ourselves and the world to think about what we’re doing as a nation.

I am humbly grateful for the examples that have been set, in large ways and small, of the integrity of peaceful protest. I am grateful for those who will not be invisible, no matter how uncomfortable it makes the rest of us.