Sam Smith - Got a note from Tina Hobson, now in her 90s, a long time activist (and widow of leading DC progressive leader Julius Hobson) responding to my article on why the young ought to be more involved in political activism. Among her comments: “Although I was 30 (after a divorce) in 1960, I became a part of the women’s movement and civil rights, although I knew little about it before then.”
An online list of DC women activists quotes her as having once said, “My mother and her friends [were my greatest influences]. And I actually went to church, Episcopal Church, when I was in the sixth grade and I remember learning about all the women saints, Joan of Arc and so forth, and I was extremely interested in them because this was my first understanding of where women were doing things on their own.”
Tina Hobson cites the four children recently rescued in the Amazon after their remarkable survival efforts as “joining you with my first effort to encourage young Americans to “help change this country for the better.”
Said Hobson; “Sent this email to a
few women activists — hoping they can use this plane crash to learn that most
people would have expected there might have been successful ‘boy scouts’ for at
least a week or two in the same Jungle, but never girls. There is the
same strength in women when faced with emotional/factual disasters at any age —
but they still need encouragement through such stories.”
As she points out: “The
mother of this story only lived 4 days after their plane crashed, but asked her
children to move on in the jungle when she knew she could not live. Three
were girls, the eldest two (13 and 9) and the 1 year old baby. This was an unbelievable demonstration of
how the girls shared their knowledge, abilities, and energy-- with their 5 year
old brother -- to save all 4 lives!
"This example
demonstrated that the step by step improvements in women’s equality can be of
major benefit to our civilization, as they have just been in Colombia and in
the Amazon jungle.”
As the Wall
Street Journal later reported:
The
children not only are very young but also found themselves lost in an
inhospitable environment, a swath of virgin jungle replete with poisonous
vipers, jaguars, spiders and, in the not-so-distant past, some of Latin
America’s most fearsome Marxist guerrillas.
But [their father] said that though Lesly is only 13, in traditional indigenous villages she is already in some ways an adult—responsible for helping with cultivating a plot of land and looking after her siblings.
“In an indigenous community, the child who is a bit older, the parents always leave the small ones in their care,” he said. “The girl took responsibility, after seeing that her mother died and that there was no one else who could help. There was no other adult.”
The soldiers who had arrived at the plane and later were involved in the search said that the children collected a blanket, a flashlight, some snacks, some netting and part of a tarp. After waiting at the plane—possibly for as long as four days, the military said—the children decided to move.
Sgt. Luber Espinosa said that indigenous trackers who teamed up with the commandos said that children would likely move every day in the direction of the sun: west. The trackers had learned this is the direction the children had always been taught to walk if lost in the jungle…
The four small children who survived 40 days in the Colombian jungle after the plane they were traveling in crashed made it on a small supply of food scavenged from the luggage as well as nuts and wild fruit found on the forest floor, relatives and the country’s army said.
In sum, activism can begin when you’re very young
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