On Tyranny - Lesson 20: Be as Courageous as You Can [and final thoughts]

We did it! We're here! To the 5ish people who've been consistently reading these posts, I don't know who you are but thanks for joining me on this journey and I hope you stick around for the next book. :) 

The final lesson Timothy Snyder gives us from the 20th Century On Tyranny is to be as courageous as possible. The chapter sub-header is a little ominous: "If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny." Oof, right?

Well, that's it. That's the chapter. It took me a while to chew on this before I knew how to write about it. There's so little meat, yet the dish is very hardy.

At the end of the day, most people don't want to be the martyr. We don't want to give everything, we just want to give enough so that positive change can happen. Sometimes, maybe often times, that does require us to give everything. I think it's important to know where your personal boundaries lie before you get to a point of testing them. What does it mean to give everything for you? Are you willing to be jailed for your resistance to tyranny? Are you willing to lose friends and family members who commit themselves to a tyrannical leader? Are you willing to be the person to stand up for what's right despite the threat of bodily harm? You won't find judgement from me when drawing those lines for yourself, but they need to be drawn. And when those boundaries are tested, let it be a test of your courage and strength to hold true to yourself and your values. 

This book, as I stated in a previous lesson, was tremendously accessible. Each chapter is just a few pages long, and it's a very easy read. If I hadn't been supplementing each chapter with my own commentary on public display, I might have finished it in a sitting or two. I would definitely recommend it for anyone interested in political non-fiction.
That said, there are times when it's apparent, in my opinion, that the book was written by someone with a good amount of privilege. Timothy Snyder is an affluent white man and there are some lessons where the privileges he enjoys rang through the text as somewhat hollow for me as a woman who grew up in relative poverty. Still, he knows what he's talking about in the context of Europe's fall to tyranny in the 20th century and I think all of the lessons could be applied to a better strategy for fighting tyranny in America. I'm grateful for this book and it's contextualization of modern politics juxtaposed with 20th century sociopolitical backslides. 

Thanks again to Lobstah Grl for inspiring this series by doing short-form summaries on BlueSky! <3