This Friday (May 9), Dr. Eric Reeves will receive the Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice.
Reeves, 58, is a professor of English literature at Smith College who has devoted most of his time in the past nine years writing about the terrible strife in the northeastern African country of Sudan. Recently, I interviewed Dr. Reeves at his Victorian-era home at the edge of the Smith campus in Northampton.
In 1999, Reeves had a conversation with the American director of Doctors Without Borders, who told him that the organization was pulling out of Sudan because conditions there had become too intractable for the doctors to be effective.
Reeves, who is a skilled woodworker and sculpts beautiful wooden bowls and vases, had been selling his work and donating the proceeds to DWB. He became curious about Sudan and made it a personal project to inform himself about the country, its history and its problems.
When he learned about Sudan's 21-year-old civil war and the 2 million deaths and 4 million refugees it had caused, he was blown away by the epic scale of the ongoing disaster. As one who believes in the power of words to change things, Reeves decided to write about Sudan in hopes of mobilizing citizens and our government to focus on the country's disintegration.
In a development he couldn't predict, Reeves ended up with a permanent job on his hands. He wrote oped after oped piece for newspapers. Although the essays were effective — they got attention and stimulated wide discussion — Reeves said he didn't anticipate the glacial pace of change.
In 2003, after having labored for four years to publicize the civil war, Reeves watched as the genocide in Darfur unfolded. Since then he has worked incessantly to halt the madness.
To the casual observer, Reeves' enormous endeavor might seem to have come out of nowhere. In 1999 he was a soft-spoken academic with a terrific family, a great teaching post in a wonderful community, and what looked like a comfortable path ahead of him.
But there was one early sign of Reeves' penchant for melding principle, integrity and action. During the Vietnam War, he pursued and received conscientious objector status. In Nixonian 1969, that was no small undertaking.
Nonetheless, feeling self-conscious about the question, I asked him what made him dedicate himself to Sudan. He said that understanding the magnitude of the killing in the country spurred him to action.
As gracious and modest as he is, he would have left it at that.
But I persisted. What inside him made or allowed him to make the exceptional response that he had? Was he motivated by religion, family, what?
Reeves said that he has "no gift of faith." And he advised me to read the short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula Le Guin.
The story is a clever, haunting tale of a utopian society in some unspecified time and place. In a city called "Omelas" there is happiness, music, comfort, plenty, peace and community. Importantly, there is no guilt in Omelas.
Le Guin even lets the reader define some of this blissful society. Want to add fantastic inventions, more luxuries, nonaddictive drugs, and frequent orgies? So be it, Le Guin writes.
But just as the concept of Omelas is starting to feel impossibly unattainable, and Le Guin can sense the reader's skepticism mounting, she mentions one last feature of the city: In a few basements of Omelas' buildings, locked in the dark, are kept some number of very young, feeble-minded, throwaway children. They must be poorly fed, poorly treated and permanently imprisoned, or all of the joy and abundance of the utopia will disappear. That is the deal.
The adults of Omelas have become used to this injustice, and accept it. But when the healthy children of the city are first shown the basement inhabitants, they are shocked and sickened.
Sometimes an adolescent — or even an adult — will leave the utopia. They walk out into the darkness and head for a place even Le Guin cannot describe. Nobody knows if it exists. But the ones who leave Omelas seem to know where they are going.
Perhaps Dr. Reeves didn't want to accuse us of becoming indifferent to human suffering, too quick to look for and grab the reasonable rationalization like those "realpolitik" considerations that attend all geopolitical events.
But it is clear that he simply walked away from whatever deal it is that many of us — and certainly our governments — have embraced.
But that's not Reeves' final thought on the matter, because he's not arrogant. He specifically instructed me to notice the unresolved story ending. Reeves knows that the world might be unfixable.
And though I'm guessing he's certain there is a community somewhere beyond Omelas, he understands that not all of us can see it.
Brian T. Watson of Swampscott is a regular Viewpoint columnist and a member of the Salem Award Committee. The Salem Award is given each year to keep alive the lessons of the Salem witchcraft hysteria of 1692 and to recognize individuals whose commitment to social justice and human rights has alleviated discrimination and promoted tolerance.
