I recently re-saw all the episodes of the HBO mini-series Band Of Brothers and am in the middle of reading the book written by Stephen E. Ambrose. Of course everyone acted really well and there were awe-inspiring scenes that are very hard to forget. The book, though being read after having seen the series, continues to engross and move me as if I this is the first time that I am being told the story. But this post is not about the series and it is not about the book. This post is about a Cause that brought a certain group, a rather large group, together and made them fight as one... made them live as one.
Be it the soldiers fighting in World War II or the Indians in the middle of the freedom struggle before 1947.... They shared a history that you and I cannot even begin to imagine. We can read about it, watch movies about it, participate in well informed discussions about it, but what we can never do is live it or feel it... Only yearn for a similar solidarity....
We are talking about a group of people who forgot everything in the face of a singular objective. Everything else faded into the background, and they were united in moving towards their goal, towards achieving something that seemed impossible, but determined to achieve it nonetheless. It did not matter what their personal likes and dislikes were. It did not matter where they came from. It did not matter whether they liked each other or not. The fought together and achieved the unimaginable.
Thinking about those times and trying to imagine what it must have been like leaves me feeling a little insignificant, inadequate and frankly speaking, a little bored with our current existence. What have we done that could come even close to what history has already achieved? A hundred years from now, what will they teach children in their history lessons at school about the times we are living in?
My grandmother once said to me, that the problem today probably is that we lack a Cause. They participated in the freedom struggle and lived a life that we can't imagine today because they had a Cause - to be free. The excitement rife in the very air they breathed was because of this Cause. A Cause we don't have today.
Have all the worthy causes already been fought over? Would we rather sit back and live our sedate little lives and let someone else do the fighting for us? Why should we stand up for something when there are others who will make that stand for us? Is living our daily lives taking up so much of our time and energy that we would rather leave all the fighting to someone else, someone whose profession is to fight for our rights?
