Parks and Boromir explained...

Andy asked… “What’s the connection between Boromir and Rosa Parks? Can you make that more clear for people?” (paraphrased).

Rosa Parks remained seated, not for fame or glory, not because it was easy, but because it was the right thing to do. There was no real reason for her to believe that anyone would give a damn about what she was fighting for. I have heard it argued, as if to lessen the credit due to her, that she was not an accidental warrior, but an activist well aware of what she was undertaking - as if this somehow means she wasn’t as strong as we thought. On that bus she refused to give her seat to a white man in a city, in a society, in which less resistance on the part of African Americans had resulted in fatal consequences. Without real reasons for hope that things would change… (the ring of power still on the hand of the oppressor…) “she sat down and stood up” for civil rights.

I have the kind of respect for Ms. Parks that I have for Martin Luther King, jr. King continued to struggle for what he believed was right despite threats and in the midst of violence. He knew his life was in danger for the things he espoused. If you listen to his last speech, it is unimaginable that he didn’t know his death was imminent. He was flesh and blood, flawed as we all are, yet he struggled without any assurance that the situation could truly change.

These days, the ends seem to justify the means… and what are the ends that justify these means? Even among high school and college students there is often a wink and a nod to things like cheating. It is the sum of our lives, the moments when we think no one’s looking that the “content of our character” is laid down. We pull for the figures in books and in films that “do the right thing”… Harry is our hero; Aragorn our king… but in the day to day struggle… do we fulfill those virtues we pretend to embrace?

Parks and King were like Boromir… they fought on in the face of hopelessness… yet, unlike Boromir, a construction of the ideal realm, their hearts beat faster with the fear that they faced. The danger was not imagined.

(I wonder for myself what my life will stand for…) A life lived well, with an awake mind and a passionate heart, that is the greatest kind of art. The sum of our lives together make the world that we live in…

What is right is rarely easy. By what standard will we judge what we commit ourselves to?