~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Have you ever wondered how brave you are? Would you become an insurgent if Greene County were under siege or occupied?
I’ve played this what-if game since my sophomore year with Miss Price, history teacher at Jefferson High School. She instructed us in a semester of what she called “Russian Reading,” the name of which I ill understood because all I can remember reading were Reader’s Digest stories on the holocaust. Maybe it was Stalin’s Russia and the gulag.
This is when I began to wonder that if called upon, would I hide persecuted people? Would I bomb railroad tracks and blow up bell towers? Would I become the enemy’s friend to save my skin?
I hope I never have to find out, but the scenarios continue to beg my curiosity, and in idle moments I write the stories in my head of Colleen the Conniver lurking and spying along the Raccoon River where the alien – or well-known — enemy drinks beer and naps. Having long been a tree climber, I have seen myself spying from high branches through windows of the captured Courthouse where the deceptively friendly but in truth evil occupier occupies. I have sold poison vanilla cokes from behind the counter at Tucker’s Pharmacy and leant out books from the library with handguns embedded in the middle pages.
However, I’m kind of a chicken. I tremble like an aspen at heights; I was the archetypal old lady long before I was chronologically old, so I have never passed on a two-lane unless clear for at least two miles. Because of this lack of intrepidness, I doubt I would volunteer for the front-line insurgency work, let alone be asked. I think my chicken-heart shows, so whoever was in charge of the Greene County Underground (known as the Undergreenes) would not be handing me the backpack so I could slip silently over the span at Eureka Bridge in the dark of the moon to lodge the explosive.
When I’m truly honest as I concoct these scenarios, I see myself hiding in the kitchen. If I forced myself to toughen up and rise to the occasion, possibly I would cook and sell my not very good casseroles that would make the enemy have a stomach ache. I can do this to my own family, so I do have some practice.
Maybe I would be compelled by my own weak-Willyness to at least get off the dime and set up a printing press in my basement behind a false wall – I see exactly where this could be done, cleverly camouflaged by my children’s moldering grade school art that I have sappily saved– and turn out scurrilous articles regarding the enemy’s education, eating habits and parentage. Even though most newspapers refuse to print poetry, I could; after all, it would finally be my paper. I have a feeling I would be effective writing poems to make the invaders wish they were illiterate, demoralizing them to the point of depression.
If we were occupied, who would cave, who would only pretend to and who would disappear completely underground to most thoroughly rout the enemy? I can’t speak for other people but we all do have our opinions about one another. Would those who lead now lead then? Would the real heroes be the least among us?
And always the big question at the end – am I able to live with myself after it is all over?
Of course, this is the question no matter what, isn’t it?
