In memoriam: Bobby Sands
Twenty-seven years ago on May 5, Bobby Sands died of starvation at the age of 27. (Fearful symmetry, as Blake put it so gracefully.) Hunger strikes to protest injustice almost killed Mahatma Gandhi and Cesar Chavez, two of my heroes, and the decision to speak out against the abuses of Britain’s Maze Prison would kill Sands and a group of other “blanket men” who refused to wear the uniforms of common criminals that their jailers gave them.
The story of how Sands wrote what would become the book One Day in My Life is heroic indeed, even if a commitment to nonviolence turns you against the tactics of the IRA. On pieces of toilet tissue and other scraps, Sands wrote his powerful expose of the beatings, abuses and mistreatment he and the others at the Maze experienced. It’s a book that can be read in one sitting, but will grab your senses forever. As Thoreau wrote, “Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
On the 27th year after Bobby Sands’ death, let us pray for peace in Northern Ireland and in every country where’s there division, injustice and hate.
