For Andreia Cunha
For Manuel Sarmento Pizarro
In February this year, American author and activist John Pavlovitz wrote to then Attorney General an open letter: “Dear Pam Bondi (A letter from a father)”. For almost a year, people from around the world had been witnessing the mean, unintelligent, perverted, arrogant and, at the same time, submissive way Bondi defended her master, the president of the USA – and not The People. Pavlovitz resumed the feelings those repeated spectacles provoked in many of us in a rather simple question: “How does someone become Pam Bondi?”.
“I wonder how an apparently intelligent human being finds themselves sitting in that chair in front of the watching world in a moment of such gravity, so completely bereft of empathy, so seemingly unencumbered by other people’s suffering, and so strident in the face of simple accountability. (…)
Are the money and the power so intoxicating that they have rendered your conscience inoperable?
Has your journey been filled with a million small moral compromises that burdened you in the beginning, but slowly emotionally anesthetized you to the point that now you feel nothing?
Are you so beholden to the redacted man who enabled your ascension to this lofty space that you are willing to shield him from the litany of heinous sins that you must know well he is guilty of?”
The
question has stayed with me and, considering the three possibilities laid out
by Pavlovitz, I tend to focus on the second: eventually becoming anesthetized
after accepting “a million small moral compromises”. I see in this the
challenge each one of us faces daily and how we often succumb. Although most of
us don’t reach high and influential positions like the one Bondi held until
earlier this month, we should have no doubts as to the way we help normalise
unacceptable and even immoral attitudes through daily compromises. By not
knowing when and how to say ‘no’.
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| Photo: Maria Vlachou |
Days before
I read Pavlovitz’s letter, I visited the
Mémorial des Déportations in Marseilles. A temporary exhibition, “Marseille 1900-1943: La mauvaise
reputation”, aimed
at exploring how the destruction of the city and the deportation of hundreds of
its citizens in 1943 was the result of a bad reputation built, along almost
half a century, on a particular vision of it as “an ungovernable and ungoverned
city, a rebellious city, a den of thieves, the symbol of political and moral
decay.” What stood behind this vision was the fact that Marseille, apart from a
“ghetto of poor people” was a also a refuge for Italian anti-fascists, Spanish
republicans, German opponents, stateless Jews one of the centres of the French
resistance. Hitler himself, with the help of the Vichy regime, ordered the
first major roundup of French Jewish families, the evacuation of 20.000 and the
destruction of 14 hectares north of the Vieux Port. “How did we come to this?”,
visitors were asked through a video with archival images, just like practically
every Holocaust museum questions us. “Some Were Neighbors”, was an exhibition I saw years ago
at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, discussing collaboration and
complicity during Nazi domination. And while this exhibitions examines a
variety of motives and pressures that influenced individual choices (fear,
indifference, antisemitism, career concerns, peer pressure, chances for
material gain – how does one become Pam Bondi?), another exhibition at the Kazirn Dossin Memorial Museum in Mechelen (Belgium) remembers the policemen
who chose to resist (for example, by tipping off Jewish people or by ‘simply’
saying ‘no’.).
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| Photo: Maria Vlachou |
How does
all this come together? Big atrocities are not the only reason why we should
question our role as individuals in normalising evil. Because before we get to
that point, there are million other everyday moments when we need to make a
moral choice, when the easiest thing is to compromise. A culture that counters
evil, a culture of care, empathy, courage and trust needs to be built and
preserved every day and to guide our actions. These values can only mould a
culture, though, when shared by more than one person, when they are
collectively embraced and practice. It is solidarity that helps us counter fear
and find the courage to say ‘no’.
My last
words are for journalists Patrícia Silva and Patrícia Cruz Almeida who left a
city council meeting in solidarity with a fellow journalist, after the mayor
said that she lost trust in the latter and accused him of “doing politics”. I
don’t know either of them personally, but they are among the silent heroes we
desperately need.
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