Larger than life

Death is always sad, but now seems to be as fitting a time as any to die, so close to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month. I was reminded of one of my grandmother's favorite sayings when I heard that Betty Friedan had died Saturday: "Bad things come in threes."\nFriedan's death follows Rosa Parks's death Oct. 25 and Coretta Scott King's death a little more than two weeks ago. In a short time, we have lost three civil rights icons. Facing such a monumental task as eulogizing these three women, I am humbled. I'm not going to sum up their achievements because there is not enough space to do them justice and because I'd like to believe that our country's education system has not yet failed us that much.\nThese women were unable to sit still while people told them "change takes time." They did not back down from a resistant culture and they were unwilling to sacrifice their principles.\nAnd we are no doubt the beneficiaries of their strength. As students, we were mostly born in the '80s, after "Mississippi Burning" and the brutalities of the civil rights movement, after Title IX and the National Organization for Women, after Stonewall. We were only children when Ryan White died and the L.A. riots occurred. My own mother's stories about a childhood where she could not bring her black friend to Riverside Park in Indianapolis seem nearly as distant to me as the Civil War. It's easy to forget this change came less than 40 years ago, and just as easy to become apathetic. \nThat's why I am not only deeply saddened, but also deeply scared by the passing of Parks, King and Friedan. \nWhen founders of such movements as the feminist movement and the civil rights movement die, they immediately become mythologized. They are no longer humans who made mistakes along the way, but infallible gods, and any discussion that betrays their humanity is akin to heresy. \nThey certainly deserve all the praise bestowed upon them, yet this praise is also potentially dangerous. When their cultural persona becomes so large that we forget that they too were human beings, their achievements seem out of reach to "common" men and women. In a way, it allows us to delude ourselves into inaction. \nWe owe it to them, then, to remember Betty Friedan, Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks not as infallible gods, but as imperfect individuals, who, like us, lived in an imperfect society.\nAbove all, it is our generation's responsibility to recognize inequality in even its most insidious forms, and it is our right to develop new leaders and to ensure that the phrase "civil rights" does not lose its relevance. Sooner or later, nearly everyone who participated in the original movement will be gone. We cannot let everything they achieved die with them.\nFinally, I hope the sentimentality of this column can be excused, but even the most cynical among us needs something to believe in.