When a middle-aged Albany woman, a computer technician by trade, walks 133 miles during the hottest week of the summer to deliver petitions for retrial to a judge on behalf of a Kurdish father of four whom she had never met until he was imprisoned on terrorism-related charges, is she a zealot?
When the former mayor of Sharon Springs, a birder by avocation, a logger by trade, a Vietnam War veteran by history, carries out a hunger strike for 80 days in solidarity with imprisoned Muslim men 1,400 miles away, people he has never encountered, risking permanent ill health and early demise, is he a "tree hugger," an aging hippie, an extremist?
When local citizens travel to Syracuse, Nevada, California or Pakistan and are arrested, facing hearings and fines and imprisonment to protest the United States' embrace of weaponized drones in the homelands of fellow civilians, as well as America's continued embrace of a nuclear posture, threatening a future, which they are too old already to ever see, are they ideologues, unrealistic "do-gooders"?
When a minister from our region, a military chaplain in Afghanistan, brooked a general reprimand and dismissal from his post to deliver a sermon last Veterans Day in Kandahar, which begged forgiveness for the evil perpetuated on our "national altar of war," an evil which results in "sanitized killing," enabled by citizens' insulation which results in soldiers' isolation, was he speaking as a rebel and a renegade?
Or have these people come to realize, in a way too compelling to ignore, that as citizens of history's current superpower they bear a responsibility to speak out, to stand up for compassion and moderation, justice and truth, freedom and transparency, peace and a sustainable future.
Perhaps these individuals are aware that history always poses, to the conscious, a choice. This choice between action and quiescence, between the affirmation of life or the embrace of fear, between self-interest and isolation, on the communal and public as well as the individual plane — has moved them to act.
In his call to action, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., expressed it like this: "Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all of the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak ... for the weak, the voiceless, for the victims of the nation, and for all those it calls enemy."
The Reverend King knew that actions speak louder than words.
And so with an intrepid spirit, many local residents seem to have joined, of late, the many others from around the planet who, by their willingness to embody the realization that the political is always moral, have forged the courage to humbly and passionately break the silence.
Recently, it would seem, so many fellow local citizens have challenged us to understand that as children of history we cannot be, to use the historian Howard Zinn's phrase, "neutral on a moving train." Eschewing the fear of being labeled, they have declared themselves activists, embracing the understanding that the label is, in truth, synonymous with citizen.
Maureen Baillargeon Aumand of Colonie is a member of Women Against War.