What do You Fight For?

I was recently watching the movie Citizen X (the one about the Russian serial killer) and one of the lines in the movie struck me as fairly profound. The hero of the movie was bantering with a man who was his superior about the proper way to go about catching the serial killer. Hero says "You believe a man is what he says?" The superior says "when he is paid to talk for a living." The hero admonishes "A man is what he fights for."

Growing up in the U.S. I think I have become far too caught up in the idea that what I am is somehow inextricably caught up with how I am employed. (A topic I intend to come back to in another post). I found this hero's idea of self definition or really self-ideation to be much more interesting and perhaps useful. Undoubtedly, at least in part, because I find the things that I fight for to be much more important than the things that I have so far found employment doing.

For starters I would have to clarify what I mean by "fights for." In my mind to fight for something has nothing to do with physical violence. Instead to fight for something is to make a commitment to an ideal that you carry through in your day to day actions. You fight for passionate beliefs you feel compelled to take risks for. The ideas you fight for are the ones you would hazard losing your best friends over, rather than compromise those beliefs.

The core concept is one of personal integrity. Is my identity whole if I refuse to live by x or y ideal that I have set up for myself? Most of the times these struggles will take place in your own mind.

Of course not every personal belief will fall into the category of things that someone fights for. For some people, none of their beliefs have this strong of a value.

As for myself, there are many things that I fight for in this way. I don't have all the answers for how I would want the world to look, or how the infinite details of it should be organized. But I do have a few ideas and basic principles that I know I want to be a bigger part of it. Agope, as preached by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., tolerance, equality, understanding, and love are a few of the things I fight for.

In some sense I guess that means I fight against violence, intolerance, inequality, ignorance, and hatred, but I would much rather think about what I am fighting for instead. I would challenge people to think about the things that they fight for and decide whether they would want others to judge them based on those things.