Don't leave us hanging, dudes!

That’s me, JK Rowling, Robbie Coltrane and Robert Webb, hanging upside down, our gooses cooked a la Mussolini! I love the idea of time-travelling back to 5-years-ago-me and trying to explain what this photograph was about.

“Is that Robbie Coltrane?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know him now?”

“No.”

“And that’s JK Rowling.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know her?”

“No.”

“And this person wants you dead.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We don’t think men should be allowed to cheat in women’s sports.”

We’d be there all night!

Anyway, it brought to mind an excellent, excellent piece from my old site taken from a Derrick Jensen Facebook post.

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"There is a common misconception about how Hitler got people to go along with his plans, including the Holocaust, and including waging an offensive war the Germans could never win.  

Movies have caused us to believe that anyone who refused to go along with Hitler's plans was sent to the Eastern Front and probable death.  This isn't true at all. Normally the threat was that if they didn't go along with his plans they wouldn't receive promotions.

In other words, their primary fear was not that they would die, but that they would lose their jobs, or they wouldn't get promotions.  In fact, many of the rank and file members of the Nazi party joined not because they agreed with the ideology but because certain jobs, for example, engineering jobs, were available only to members of the Nazi Party.  In other words, they joined because they didn't want to lose their jobs, or because they wanted to get jobs.  

Of course, this story isn't true only of those living under the Nazis. this same motivation explains most people's silence in the face of injustice. And of course, this is part of what Upton Sinclair was talking about when he wrote, "It's hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it."  So this note is for all of those who say, "I can't speak up because if I do I'll lose my job." You have a lot of company.  Yes, we all know that, as I read in some thriller novel or another, "The first one through the door always gets shot," or perhaps more accurately, "The first one who speaks out against injustice loses his/her job."  

But those who are first through the door, those who do take a bullet for the cause, those who first speak up, those who do imperil their careers, need to not be left hanging. After the first one through the door there needs to be another, and another. After the first person who speaks there needs to be another, and then another.   Don't leave the courageous ones hanging.  Join them. Take the risks they are taking.  

And if that's too scary, read the novel Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad. It's about someone who has a failure of courage and does not act as he should, and who then turns the rest of his life into one huge act of redemption for his momentary cowardice. Read it. Read it again. And then act in the real world.  It's never too late to gain courage. It's never too late to also burst through that door. It's never too late to speak up. It's never too late to find your courage."

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Be the next through the door. Sign the JK Rowling petition.