Marie Colvin was a foreign correspondent working from the UK, but present in the most violent and conflicted areas of the world. She brought to our awareness the extreme oppression suffered by world citizens in the most violent conflicts imaginable. Her calling was to bear witness to the atrocities taking place around the world, to let all of us know to the best of her ability what was going on in war-torn and oppressed regions far from the comfort of our own homes.
PHOTO BY DAVE M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES
She wasn’t fearless. Rather, she moved forward with fear. After losing her eye in an explosion in Sri Lanka in 2001, she suffered from PTSD and perhaps from a deeper awareness of her own vulnerability. But that didn’t stop her from reporting what she witnessed in war zones around the world. She knew that she risked her life to share the realities of those who suffer, to plead the cases of the oppressed who are imprisoned, injured, raped, dehumanized, and killed during civil strife. It takes incredibly brave people to do this kind of work, and it demands honor to them when their life is taken while in pursuit of turning the attention of the rest of the world to the worst of humanity.
Colvin knew that Syria was a dangerous place to go, and in fact, called it the worst she had seen. She, and other journalists, had been banned from the country, but knowing that the ban existed so that Syria could hide the targeted violence aimed toward its own people, Colvin knew she had to be there to share the stories of the Syrian people. Her final reports were of the dramatic deaths of the innocent at the hands of the Syrian military. I imagine that Colvin would see her death as no more or no less important than the death of anyone in Syria, and she would be right. But we have all lost something in Colvin’s death–a voice that could remind us of the vulnerability of us all, of the ease by which humans remain good or become evil, of the mandate that we care about other human beings and take the right actions to stop their suffering.
How does one become a voice like this, a voice of conscience? What do I have in me that can make the kind of difference that Marie Colvin made? Marie Colvin was one of those women I always wished I had the courage to be. Now, her mandate stands before me, and I don’t know how to say no.
i am dismantled 