Sanger’s Passion

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
- Oscar Wilde

I asked a friend recently what in life she might regret. “Not finding my passion”, she lamented. It was a shocking answer given that she had blazed trails for women in her field and had a list of charitable activities whose volume would rival Angelina Jolie.

Mike Wallace asked Margaret Sanger, one of the world’s most famous trailblazers, about finding her passion in a 1957 interview.

Sanger says she was a “born humanitarian”. She looks straight at Wallace and says with a stern and unflinching expression, “I don’t like to see people suffer, I don’t like to see cruelty, even to this day.”

Wallace presses her further. He speculates that it was not simply the cause itself, but the breathtaking rush of making change, that may have spurred on Sanger.

“Is it possible, Wallace says, “that the movement itself, the feeling of wanting to do anything that you felt was important, that perhaps that moved you a good deal. Because, the fact remains that you led a movement against overwhelming pressures that stem back to centuries and in doing so according to your biography you even left your first husband..”

Sanger dismisses Wallace’s theory, and goes on to criticize a host of social ills from child poverty to homophobia. She has no tolerance for a world which bears children that are destined to be sick or disenfranchised. Still, Wallace persisted.

Could it be, despite Sanger’s genuine concern for “suffering”, that some of us are also spurred by the adreneline of the movement even while we believe we are drawn only to the cause itself?