WHO WOULD YOU BE?

The poem below by Dielle Ciesco (https://dielleciesco.com/) anticipates some of
the moral and ethical questions that hopefully will arise during the NCC seminar I
will present on Monday May 10, 2021.
As she suggests, these are questions which ‘Now is a good time to ask’!
Ernesto Vasquez, MD

Who would you be?

A lot of people wonder: if I’d been alive at the time of World War II, who

would I have been?

Would I have been one of the self-interested sycophants, unquestioning

in compliance, perhaps even cowardly so, against my better knowing?

Or would I have been one of the feeble-minded, willing to turn a blind eye

to ensure my own comforts?

Would I perhaps have been one of the power-hungry, ready to perpetrate

humiliation, cruelty, and violence against others? Or would I have been

one of the brave and just resist, risking everything for a justice that2

served others more than myself?

We all know who we like to think we would be, but would we really?

Now is a good time to ask yourself.

Would you be a person who risked career, income, credibility, friendships,

respect, comforts, and social visibility if you could bring light to something

terribly, terribly wrong?

Would you risk unfair treatment, slander, ridicule, and ostracism to speak

out? Would you risk even prison or death?

And what about the people who have done so or are currently trying?

Would you be one of their accusers, judging them and attacking? Would

you simply dismiss them as irrational or as succumbing to some

character flaw?

Or would you listen and offer support, or at least hold the questions they

are bringing forth with curiosity?

Now is a good time to ask.

Dielle Ciesco

May 2, 2021