It's never too late, but please hurry

From the archives

Reprinted here with with Derrick Jensen's permission is his powerful recent Facebook post. Thanks to Stella O'Malley for sending it to me. (I've added paragraph breaks where they seem appropriate, but they may not match Derrick's as I can't find the flipping thing).

"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."