You Learn By Living by Roosevelt Eleanor

Author:Roosevelt, Eleanor [Roosevelt, Eleanor]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

7

The Right to Be an Individual

WE ARE facing a great danger today—the loss of our individuality. It is besieged on all sides by pressures to conform: to a standardized way of living, to recognized—or required—codes of behavior, to rubber-stamp thinking. But the worst threat comes from within, from a man’s or woman’s apathy, his willingness to surrender to pressure, to “do it the easy way,” to give up the one thing that is himself, his value and his meaning as a person—his individuality.

It’s your life—but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

Over the years, I have had to give a great deal of thought to this whole problem of conforming and nonconforming, to determining when I should conform, when I should not. Because circumstances brought a fierce and inescapable light of publicity on any actions or words of mine, which in another person might have passed unnoticed, I had to face the fact that even trivial actions and careless words could, under that bright light, appear larger than life-size.

I remember one horrible experience at a time when the newspapers were filled with the tragedy that came to the young Lindberghs after their child was kidnaped. The whole country was roused to sympathy for them and to antagonism toward any human being who could seize upon a helpless baby and put his parents through this terrible ordeal. Rumors and stories were constantly in the papers.

I traveled up from Washington and as I came off the train in New York several reporters met me with the latest rumor that the guilty man had been found. They asked me the inevitable question: Didn’t I feel that this man should go to the chair?

I had no time to reflect upon the state of public opinion or the ways that newspapers might represent or misrepresent whatever I said. So I said what I felt: namely, that I didn’t think anyone should take a life when, by doing so, no good could be accomplished. If a man was innocent, as might someday be proved, then justice had miscarried. If he was guilty, you could not bring back the lost child, nor could the hours of agony which his parents had had to live through be wiped out, nor could you alleviate the suffering which they would still have to undergo.

I felt that anyone who had committed this particular type of crime was probably mentally ill. I was convinced that he should be prevented from ever again endangering his fellow human beings, but something in me has always been opposed to capital punishment. What right

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