From 1981: The immortality of Bobby Sands | Chuck Stone

This column originally appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News on May 5, 1981. On Monday, Chuck Stone was honored with a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize Board.

If I had to say what his age was, I would say it was 90. His eyes are sunk into his head, the bones are sticking out. There is no movement in the body. His face is a blackish color. When I first saw him, I thought he was dead already.

- Oliver Hughes, brother of another hunger striker in Northern Ireland’s Long Kesh (Maze) prison on Saturday.

All weekend, I had thought about Bobby Sands.

Saturday, running errands seemed such a puny act next to the enormity of this lovely young man’s sacrifice. I fastened my radio on KYW for last-minute bulletins as if, in the act of listening, I somehow could share his defiance and expiate my helplessness.

SUNDAY, WATCHING THE Sixers disgrace themselves, I half-expected an interruption announcing the end of Sands’ mortality.

As I waited, I knew his spirit would not flee from my heart’s embrace.

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend into Heaven, thou art there: If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

Yesterday, my 27-year-old Northern Irish brother ascended into a Heaven-beckoned immortality.

My brother because all men and women who sacrifice their breath of life on liberation’s altar are my brothers and sisters.

My brother because we shared a common Fatherhood.

I REMEMBERED THE words to a hymn we sang in college at Christian Association interracial fellowships:

Join hands, then, brothers of the faith,

Whate’er your race may be:

Who serves my Father as a son

Is surely kin to me.

To me and others who wanted desperately to see Bobby Sands win that one victory, he was our kin. I think Bobby served my Father as a son.

To me and others who wanted desperately to see Bobby Sands win that one victory, he was our kin.

To British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who continues to sully the bargaining table of human exchange, he was a faceless criminal.

History’s garbage cans are strewn with similar pinheads who stubbornly wrapped themselves in the folds of unjust banners, refusing to love mercy or walk humbly.

IN THATCHER’S ISOLATED arrogance, she has as much humility as cancer has life-giving cells.

The painful tragedy of Bobby Sands’ needless death was an issue which defied compromise.

In the Long Kesh concentration camp, the IRA prisoners weren’t seeking a commutation of their sentences or even any special dispensation for their crimes.

Their requests were symbolic necessities for their personhood.

Wearing civilian clothes neither reduced their sentence nor rewarded them for what the British claim were crimes.

If anything, their request was consonant with the implied British recognition of a state of civil war through British army occupation.

For the simple principle of an article of clothing, Bobby Sands shed his life.

TO WATCH YOUR BODY slowly crumble in the dank stench of a solitary prison cell is a courageous act few freedom fighters can honor.

It is an easy act of bravery to rush into battle reinforced by the noisy company of an army.

But it is a far higher calling to go quietly through the excruciating torture of self-imposed denials, while feeling your being disintegrate into dust.

As a student of history, the youthful Sands may have read of heroes who burnished liberty’s lamp.

For his heresy, Socrates willingly drank the hemlock. To nurture his country into nationhood, Gandhi also fasted and was also jailed by the British. To liberate his people, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. practiced non-violence in the world’s most violent culture, which ironically cannibalized him.

IF THERE IS A SINGLE thread tying them to Bobby Sands, it is the eventual triumph of the ideals for which they were martyred.

When the Margaret Thatchers are recalled, history gladly suffers a contemptuous amnesia. But the Gandhis, the Martin Luther King Jrs. and the Bobby Sands are proudly immortalized.

As a student of history, the youthful Sands may have read of heroes who burnished liberty’s lamp.

They are destiny’s greatness. They are our reminders of unfinished business.

In Sands’ death, Thatcher has won a temporary victory.

But the fury will begin to build.

" There is a real sense of outrage that nobody in the world will put a lot of heat on Margaret Thatcher," bitterly declared George McLaughlin, a New York high school counselor, during a Sunday march up Fifth Avenue.

The heat can take many forms. Unfortunately, one is the escalation of violence.

BUT SANDS’ MOTHER and Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, Northern Ireland’s modern-day Joan of Arc, have appealed to their fellow Catholics to keep the peace.

“My son is dying,” tearfully declared Rosaleen Sands early yesterday." But he has offered his death to improve conditions, not to cause death outside."

Echoing her call for a peaceful reaction, the fiery McAliskey promised that “we will isolate Britain by unity and dignity.”

That works when the enemy shares a common civility.

In the vacuum of statesmanship, the fires of violence are stoked.

The wasting of Bobby Sands’ life is only one of several tragedies for which history may one day indict Margaret Thatcher.

But tomorrow’s indictment does not solve today’s crime.

IF THERE IS TO BE an end to bloodshed in Northern Ireland, then the conscience of the world must speak out.

A global solidarity must take the lead in searching for a spirit of Camp David to bring Catholic and Protestant together.

If Britain refuses to cooperate by using the German rationale for the Holocaust that hers is an " internal matter," then let a global togetherness be the force which isolates Britain " by dignity and unity."

That is the cause for which the immortal Bobby Sands so peacefully surrendered his life.