At first, I wanted to answer this question from a spiritual angle along the lines of “serve, love, give, purify, meditate, realize“ the credo of my guru Swami Sivananda but then I came across an article by a guy from my hometown which inspired me to a different answer.
Like Swami Sivananda he is also a doctor, so a professional helper, but unlike many other doctors he goes the extra mile. So this, in a nutshell, is already the answer to this weeks question: Go the extra mile!
In all your endeavours, professional or private, in the pursuit of your dreams, go the extra mile, give everything you got to give because the world is full of half-hearted mediocrity.
There are the big role models like Schwarzenegger, Jobs, Musk who didn´t listen to the naysayers, but everybody can go the extra mile in their respective field.
My grandmother for example was as simple as they came in those days, but in her simplicity she had an unwavering sense for right and wrong. She worked as a maid for a wealthy Jewish family in her home town. She told me once that this posh family was very nice to her which in those days meant the world to people like my grandmother. So when the Nazis came to take the family away, my grandmother was out there in the street protesting and telling them that this was not right. So the Nazis wanted to arrest her too, but luckily, one of the SA men knew her and told the others to let her go. Her bravery, or stupidity, as some of her relatives called it, nevertheless filled me with pride when I learned about it.
One of the sisters of my other grandmother, my father´s mother, had bought a house from the Jewish owners and literally went the extra mile, driving at night in some kind of cloak-and-dagger operation to the neighboring town where the Jews were staying to bring them the money for the house, giving them the means to make it to the States.
After the war, a government commission for the return of Jewish property, wanted to take the house from my relatives, because the commission thought, the house had been disappropriated under the Nazi regime, but luckily, the former Jewish owners were in town on a visit from the States and verified my grandaunt´s claim, that she had properly bought the house from its rightful owners. So the extra mile paid off.
Now back to the present.
The guy I want to talk about is a doctor. I have known him since the eighties from our common anti-nuclear, pro-environmental, antifascist struggles. He has a group practice with some colleagues in a posh street and a big appartment building with lots of tennants, he is successful, respected, a lifelong eco and political activist, veteran of countless demonstrations and protest actions since the seventies, he has quite the life.
But guess where he is right now?
Dr Michael Wilk is a few minutes by ambulance behind the Rakka front line in northern Syria, working at a trauma stabilization point, having people die under his hands every day.
I think his first experience with people dying under his hands was on September 28, 1985 during a demonstration against Nazis in Frankfurt, Germany, where one of us was overrun by police with one of those big Mercedes water cannons. “De Wilk“ was not even a doctor yet, still a medical student and one of our medics (yes, we had our own medics to treat the injured, usually eye problems from tear gas and the occasional head injury from police batons). He was one of the first responders trying to give first aid, but he was trained enough to see that it was too late and the man died on the way to the hospital inside the ambulance. The street fighting of the following days was the closest I have ever been to a warlike scenario, “Fire and flame for this state!“ was not just a hollow phrase in those days.
Luckily, this was the first and only demonstration I took part in where somebody died, although it´s a bit of a miracle that not more people died during the following days, because tensions ran high on both sides. Unlike in some other countries like Turkey and South Africa in the 80s, people dying during demonstrations in Germany is very rare, so everybody was in a state of emergency during those days.
So a few days ago I read some article on steemit, part of a series about people you should know according to the author, but honestly I remember neither the author, some big shot steemian I guess, nor the person described in that article. But when I read this doctor´s article I thought this is someone people should know.
And this is not his first mission in Syria, since 2014 he has been on five humanitarian aid missions, the one at the Rakka front now being his sixth. Last year for example he was at the battle of Manbij where he sometimes also treated wounded IS fighters who did not want to be touched by female nurses, but, as he writes in his article “You cannot always comply with your patients´ wishes, especially when lives are at stake.“
And it is not only female nurses the IS fighters have a problem with, on the battle field they have to deal with the legendary Kurdish female combat units of the YPJ, even the position of high-command of the Rakka front is held by a Kurdish woman from Rakka. I think she also goes the extra mile.
And if leaving your safe, comfortable, pleasant, fulfilling life as a doctor in Germany to attend to the wounded of a terrible war, with the real danger of every day being your last, is not going the extra mile, I don´t know what is.
He himself remains modest about his missions and says:
“Some people here in Germany call my missions heroic, but the real heroes are the local doctors and nurses, who have been doing this difficult work for months, sometimes years without interruption.“
So here´s the link to his article with some video footage, just go the extra mile and learn German if you don´t know it already. 😘
I would like to end this article with an iconic photo representing so many aspects of the struggles for emancipation in this world.
source
And since I always enjoyed the task of describing a picture in school, I give it a go here:
In this picture there are fighters of the Kurdish all female YPJ with apparently one female IFB (International Freedom Batallion) fighter to the left. On the wall behind them you can see the YPJ slogan "Women, life, freedom!" and in Spanish "Without the revolution of the woman there is no revolution" which I find kind of funny because the classical slogan is "Without the liberation of the woman there is no revolution" but it is also an expression of female self-confidence and a reality of the Kurdish struggle, without the female fighters the Kurds would have long been overrun by the IS. From the desperate defense of Kobane to the Rakka front women played a substantial part, aided by the fact that the IS fighters dread to be killed by a woman, because according to their beliefs they won´t make it to paradise then.
Then you have #niunamenos "not one (woman) less" an originally Argentine feminist movement which spread across Latin America. Then you have the symbol for anarchism, the A in a circle, reminding me of one of the nicer ironies in history.
When Abdullah Öcalan, the Stalinist leader of the Kurdish PKK, came into contact with the works of Murray Bookchin in Turkish prison, he told the PKK to implement some of those anarcho ideas and the Kurds in Rojava did so too.