At What Price Human Dignity
Our world is a complex and often bewildering place. Amidst this chaos, there is a disturbing trend of labeling and patronizing groups in ways that strip them of their human dignity. These acts of indignity not only harm the victims but also erode the very fabric of our shared humanity.
“When we are really honest with ourselves, we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men!” — Ceasar Chaves at the end of a fast and a Mass of Thanksgiving
As a child of rural Alabama in the 1940s, I was surrounded by a southern environment still reeling from the Great Depression. Despite the hardships, the people I grew up with, poor working folks who owned little more than their dignity, fought each day to preserve their sense of self-worth.
Later, in my twenties, I saw photos of tenant farmer families and immediately identified with the people in the images. Walker Evans, who, along with James Agee, was assigned by Fortune magazine in 1936 to document the lives of tenant farmers in Alabama, took the photos. When Fortune declined to publish their work, Agee and Evens published a book entitled “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” in 1941, in which Agee says:
I believe that every human being is potentially capable within his ‘limits’ of fully ‘realizing’ his potentialities; that this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can assure itself.
Although the original edition only sold about 600 copies, today it is considered a classic in American art. Many credit their work, along with Roosevelt’s New Deal, for helping address the depression-era issues of social responsibility and human dignity. Like so much art, especially that effectively captures life’s anguish, this recognition came only after death.
Agee and Evans tried to distinguish between what was real and what was actual by avoiding making a judgment by committing to interaction — doing as they would be done by. It’s not always easy to make sense of what we may see while trying to learn what we believe and where our ethical concerns might require us to go. In doing so, we are drawn not to an explanation but to the profound compliment of dependence and use.
Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive.
If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired. — Erik H. Erikson
— kenne
