There is a tendency when reading fiction and indeed history to think of one’s self as the hero. Or if not that, then, at least the victim. We might sympathize with the villain, with those who’ve been ‘wronged’. But we are never, ever them. We aren’t the raiders or the heretic burners, the slavers, the thieves, rapists or conquerors. We are certainly not the angry mob.
No, we are not the citizenry bubbling with rage over history, or perceived injustice. We are not the cowards or the apathetic common man going about their days, tending to their families as extreme sentiments fester all around them—changing the culture, changing the way we speak to one another, changing the laws and the courts and the politicians until even to dissent is social destruction, and then a crime. We are not those silent as rumors begin to spread of victims of an unjust state, or at news of the out-spoken being punished—first the fools and the ideologues, and then those who mock—and then the good who won’t bend.
No. In Schindler’s List, we are Oscar Schindler. We are the one in a million. We are the man of integrity and grit and intelligence and power who not only wishes to do something, but can do something, and does. We are the hero.
We are certainly not Auschwitz prison guards, doing a job we find distasteful and justifying it in whatever way we can. We are not the Ordinary Men. We are not policemen with families and pets and middle-class lives who kiss our children goodbye, and then in the name of loyalty and brotherhood take half-naked, pregnant jews into the fields and murder them, as we retch and vomit at the grotesqueness of our own deeds.
No. We know better. We are better. Because when our friends and family, employers and leaders tell us obvious lies, we never accept them. We never repeat those lies because it’s easier, and more practical. When we are forced to choose between silence and comfort, or else articulation and adversity, we choose articulation. When given the choice between entertainment and thought, we choose thought. When given the chance to demonize strangers based on rumor, on half-baked and vague details, we never leap to conclusions because it feels good and because it’s easy. We never overreact. We keep our heads and tell our politicians and police clearly ‘Take your time, and do it right, and give us the facts, no matter what they are, when you’re ready, and we’ll be watching. Better always to have truth and justice,’ we say, ‘rather than expediency and revenge.’
And it is a very good thing we have become so superior. Because we have moved into an era of agreement, where a single system of ideas has been embraced by all seven billion of us, and now moves on in perfect harmony, without the need for borders or publicly debated ideas or their consequences, or protection for speakers from thugs and tribal aggression.
And we no longer chastise or jail men for the truth, even if it’s unpleasant. We don’t jail them for jokes, or for their strange tastes outside the norm. We accept the ascendance of the individual over the interests of the group. We no longer destroy heretics, or war with our neighbors, or let our disagreements become violent, or let the state or tyrants control our lives.
“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
One more thing for the Red Queen to believe – we are, all of us, Oscar Schindler.
Except, of course, we aren’t. It is a great and terrible moment in a person’s life the day they realize this. The day they realize they are the perpetrators of history, too. That in the great sweeping tale of blood and misery and wonder of mankind, that we too, wherever we were born, are creatures capable of child-sacrifice. That without the toil of our ancestors, the great and endless work of the dead who came before us, we are the same minds haunted by superstition, lies and murder, whether out of greed, or hate, resentment, lust or fear.
Realize this, take it deep into your soul and accept it, and you can’t go back. The next time you read the news, or lift a history book, or a work of fiction, you begin to wonder why, and how, and if I were them, what could have made me do such a thing?
It can be an unpleasant experience. It can be terrifying, and isolating, as you are forced to compare yourself, to understand the darkest impulses of your own mind, and what you must do, or what you must stop doing, to become something else – something resistant to the norm, to fight against the tide, even knowing it might drown you. So it is for heroes. It always has been.
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