I Had a Dream

I had a dream.  I wonder if Dr. Martin Luther King would be appalled, or say it meant I was trying to do right?  Would he call me a privileged onlooker, or praise my honesty and encourage my desire to do the right thing?

I should have gotten up right then to write it down when it was fresh, but I so wanted to sleep that I didn’t, even when further sleep alluded me.

I was sitting in a café, probably in the US, but really it could have been anywhere in the world.  It was a basic mid-sized café with 10 or so tables.  Suddenly a man starts to verbally attack a family, or perhaps just one person.  It is clearly racially motivated and he is screaming at them, and yelling, and he seems so violent that I’m so afraid.  I sat and watched.  Everyone in the café just sat and watched.  Nobody helped.  Nobody intervened.  I was frozen with fear.  I couldn’t move.  I sat there thinking, why aren’t I standing up?  Why aren’t I intervening?  Why am I just sitting here with my children letting this happen?  But I was so scared.  I felt immobilized by terror.  He started to hit and kick.  This faceless man was hurting people, and I didn’t move.  Suddenly, he just left.  He ran away.  I remember only then thinking, why didn’t I at least call 911?  Why couldn’t I at least do that much? 

You see, this is something that’s haunted me most of my life.  I started studying the holocaust when I was very young, probably 5^th grade.  I was profoundly affected by The Diary of Anne Frank, and started to read everything I could find on this atrocity.  I was deeply fascinated by it because 1). I couldn’t imagine how it could happen, 2). I didn’t understand how people could hate so strongly, 3). because I was introspective enough to wonder if I would have had the courage to risk my life and the lives of my family to protect another person.  I always prayed I would be strong enough and brave enough, but I was never sure.  I wanted to believe, but I was never sure.

When I was taking Jewish studies or Holocaust courses at University, I regularly got in arguments with people who were so sure that they would always stand up and help.  They were always so sure that they wouldn’t even think twice before they protected these people.  I wanted that belief, but I found it so naïve.  They could never agree with me that without the benefit of hindsight, they really didn’t know if they would.  They hadn’t stood up to every school bully they’d witnessed hurting another child.  They didn’t stand up to all the mean girls taunting other girls.  Some of them had been the mean girls.  I had stood up to the bullys, sometimes.  I had stood up to the mean girls, sometimes.  And that sometimes says a lot.

I always wanted, to the depths of my being, to believe I would be the one who would risk everything to protect someone else from a terrible wrong, stranger or friend.  But I was never sure.  And today, I can’t imagine intentionally putting my children at direct risk, for anything.  Actually, I can imagine it.  I imagine it every day.  I think about how I could tuck them behind me before I stood up and spoke calmly at the attacker.  Or how I could send them to a corner before I stood up and pulled a person off an innocent.  But then I imagine the attacker seeing my vulnerability and hurting my children.  Or simply hurting me in front of my children.  I worry at the scars it would leave.  I also worry at the scars it will leave for my children to watch me just sit and watch, or pull them away to safety without intervening.  It seems such a catch 22.  If I stand up and don’t get hurt too badly, or killed, and my children are safe, it will always be worth it.  But I don’t know before if that will be true.  If I stand up and my children have to see me get hurt or killed, or they are hurt or killed, would the victim even want that?  Would it help them?  Or would they be grateful and feel tremendous guilt for all their life?  Yet I believe so strongly that the right thing to do is to stand up, to speak up, to help.

I think about these things, all the time.  Do you?