No man is an island

In the early 1990s, I was a reporter covering the protests in Allegany County against plans to build a low-level radioactive waste dump somewhere in that county. Hordes of protesters showed up whenever the state sent out a siting commission to pick where to put this dump. They would lock arms and block roads and do everything they could to stop or slow the commission from reaching a potential site. And, along a country road somewhere in Allegany County, I found a large group of protesters blocking the road and waiting for the state police to move in, arrest them and carry them off.

In that crowd, happily clinging to the arm of someone I took to be a younger relative, was M.M. Alexandra Landis. Dr. Landis -- who told me she had a Ph.d. and had taught at Harvard -- was an elderly woman who seemed to be delighted at the prospect of being arrested. I asked her why she was there, risking arrest. I have always remembered her reply.

"Are you familiar with John Donne?" she asked. Then, with no prompting, she launched into his poem:

"No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee. "

I thought of Dr. Landis this morning as I watched the EMTs take my elderly neighbor out of her home on a stretcher and put her in an ambulance.

Posted by Ed Bond at 11:01 AM 0 comments
Friday, October 26, 2007