What's worth dying for?

Two things have struck me this week as extraordinarily brave. I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to be active in the world, and (that’s probably half the problem) - trying to decide what is important – or knowing what we/I think are the really big and important things yet not knowing how they should manifest in the day to day minutiae of our lives. Two extraordinary acts of bravery, or foolhardiness, depending on how you want to frame it struck me this week. In Nigeria, a young man by the name of Roland Macaulay has started up the first gay church - in defiance of local homophobia. In Ireland, Maura Harrington, began a hunger strike to protest Shell’s building of an oil pipeline right through her town.

It’s a symptom of our generation and the times that we often imagine that the age of great, passionate political action that can transform the world is gone; people don’t buy into that anymore, in any case, the forces are too large, too overwhelming to do anything; so we sink into the apathy of being disgruntled with the world to a degree, but not disgruntled enough to do anything about it. That’s why I find Roland Macaulay’s actions both brave and inspiring. Roland was the head of an open and tolerant church in London, and he could happily have remained there, ensconced in the safety of London’s tolerant environment. Nevertheless he’s chosen to put his money where his mouth is, foolhardy as it might seem to some. Maura Harrington has taken an even more extreme approach to political protest; her hunger strike in protest against what in England more often than not elicits a few feeble and resigned complaints from local residents – is shocking not so much because this woman is starving herself to death but more because we have become so apathetic about the ability of big business to get their way (even in the democratic west) that a hunger strike has become a conceivably way for someone to have their voice heard. I guess the thing that awes me is that, what these two people have decided is what, for them is worth dying for: for Roland Macaulay it’s the prospect (yes, perhaps not so imminent) of a Nigerian mob, and for Maura Harrington, the possibility of an excruciatingly painful death, and all this held in the balance by the belief in other people’s ability to change or at least accede to the statement they’re making – yes, I’m here and the only way I’m going to away is if you kill me first.

How many of us are that certain about what is worth dying for?