Aug 19 2007
The Worth of the Individual
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“Although they didn’t, single handedly, destroy Jim Crow and other segregationist laws, Michael Schwerner, Andy Goodman and James Chaney provided impetus for others to fight all the harder for change rather than have their deaths serve to promote cowardice to act and fear.”
By Emily Spence
8/19/07
Two dialectically opposed, prevailing theories are that large scale events (such as wars, famines, plagues, and so on) shape the course of history and, counterpoised, singular beings (like Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Ford, Adolf Hitler, Mohandas Gandhi, etc.) do so. This of course is like arguing over which came first — the chicken or the egg, as happenings mold people and people can largely direct outcomes. Anyone doubting the interplay need only consider the experiences (including the ones involved in the teaching of parental values) that influenced the life defining choices of Hugo Chávez and George Bush, Jr.
In this vein the options that individuals elect to take, in an irrevocable fashion, change the way that the future unfolds. Nothing would quite be the same without each and every one of us contributing whatever we foist into the world at large, regardless of whether these affect offspring or create change on some larger scale, as did the decision made by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., when he gave the order to release Little Boy from the bowels of Enola Gay.
All the same, people often cannot calculate in advance the effects of their actions. Indeed, they sometimes never even hear of the results. Nonetheless, their endeavors can sometimes monumentally change a life or add momentum to a cause that, in the end, forces meaningful transformations into place.