Actor and activist Mike Farrell, who's been involved for decades in human rights issues --- especially as a steadfast opponent of the death penalty --- gave an information-ladened and emotionally charged address at the closing July 22 session of the week-long Social Action Summer Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Focusing on "why I work for justice," the 66-year-old Farrell, who is best known for portraying Capt. B.J. Hunnicut in the popular television series "M*A*S*H" from 1975 to 1983, said his motivation came from ingrained feelings against injustice and inequality.
"I do it because I hate and, I suppose, fear injustice," he told more than 100 people gathered in St. Robert's Auditorium. "The phenomenon of the powerful praying on the weak had always tapped a reservoir of rage in me --- probably because I was fearful in a family dominated by a rather frightening, volcanic man.
"Add to that the promise implicit of being raised in a society that claims to honor and cherish the values of every human life. And the fact of my having a certain amount of visibility through working in an industry that touches so many lives and offers so much opportunity for contact, adds to a sense of personal responsibility."
The former Marine and UCLA student said he was continually inspired by the courage of others --- especially those once referred to as the "least among us."
"While I do believe in the possibility of personal transformation, I don't try to change the hearts and minds of others," he explained, "but rather to touch them, believing as I do that we're all fundamentally the same, with the same hopes and beliefs and aspirations."
Farrell recounted visiting a man in El Salvador imprisoned for organizing teachers who showed him acid scars of torture on his chest, and interviewing a woman in Santiago, Chile, whose husband had been "disappeared" for years. He recalled meeting another man in Virginia's deathhouse across a "cooling" table where guards with asbestos gloves would place the still smoldering bodies of those sentenced to die in the electric chair.
He also spoke of going to Rwanda in 1994, right after the genocide had been carried out. After visiting a church where Tutsi men, women and children had been hacked and burned to death, and smelling the still sickly sweet air, the horror kept replaying in his mind all night.
"This holy place --- and it literally was that to those who sought refuge here --- was now a new testimony to the unholy," he observed.
Farrell quoted from the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarence Darrow, H.G. Well and John Steinbeck on the goodness mankind was truly destined to become. He read a letter written by a friend named Joe Giarratano, an inmate at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia. The prisoner had been on death row until Farrell joined with the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons to petition the governor, who commuted the man's sentence hours before his scheduled execution.
All of these people and experiences had gone into Farrell's own commitment to fight injustice, a struggle he stressed was needed now more than ever in American society. A climate of fear, he reported, has given rise to articulate, persuasive and seductive voices on AM radio and television, from the halls of Congress, and even the pulpits of some churches that gave people permission to hate.
"For me, the answer is understanding that we're all on a journey --- a journey from the caves to the stars," Farrell said. "There will always be those who want to live in fear, and they will find everything imaginable to go back to the caves and drag as many of us as they can with them.
"But the stars are where we belong, and it only requires a little courage to reach them. It is the courage to step forward, even though we break new ground on a path not yet visible. We have to be willing to stand up to their slander, to listen carefully and renounce their lies wherever and whenever we hear them."
Then the actor, who had portrayed the compassionate physician, witty friend and concerned humanist on "M*A*S*H," urged, "Support truth, oppose wrong. Protect innocence. Promote good. We can stand for what's right and better. We can know that the answer isn't fear, but love." |