What if I told you that winning wasn’t everything?
Even if the thing for which you’re fighting is justice in an unjust society, and the failure to obtain it would mean continued injury to millions?
You might think such a thing absurd. In the face of injustice, how can anything short of success in arresting it be acceptable?
And yet, in a way, that is the lesson I learned from (and the gift of wisdom I was given by) South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, when I was 19, desperately trying to figure out the meaning of life and my role in making the world a better place.
Please don’t misunderstand. I am not suggesting that a man such as Tutu, whose anti-apartheid activism secured him the Nobel Prize in 1984 and who died yesterday at the age of 90, didn’t care about ending that system of racial oppression.
Of course, he longed for that, fought for that, and ultimately helped secure it.
But the fight against apartheid, as with any form of human cruelty, was righteous and necessary, and would have been every bit as much so, even had it never succeeded.
