The Accusations Against Cesar Chavez and the Pain of a Shattered Hero
Oh, Cesar. You’ve broken my heart. Accusations of Cesar sexually abusing young girls have come out. The New York Times did a detailed and careful look at the evidence and it certainly looks to be true.
Cesar Chavez was, and will continue to be, perhaps my greatest hero. His enormous sacrifice, it’s effectiveness, that it went on his whole life and cost him wealth, health, and any sort of normal life. A length and depth of heroism and sacrifice that’s hard to find others comparable to. For all of that he will continue to be my hero, but now with a devastating and critical flaw.
I wrote about him back in 2012, admiring his character and his accomplishments, and have continued to carry that admiration. Now these accusations, they don’t change that side of him, but they add another horribly unfortunate side. The damage to we who admired him, the damage to his reputation and causes, is terrible but of course the harm to those victims is the worst part of it.
Reverend Martin Luther King Junior was often rumored to have affairs but that’s a common human foible and something for married couples to sort out between themselves. It’s not like the amoral disregard for the harm Cesar apparently inflicted on these young victims.
While I admire his good side and his causes, if he were alive and running for office today I would vote against him. It’s one of the oddities of the Trump period that people could know of his immorality, which he has openly bragged about, yet vote for him. I couldn’t do that. He has no confirmed allegations against anyone under age, but he has demonstrated almost unbounded amoral disregard for harms he’s willing to do to others. If a candidate promised all the policy changes I could wish for, and seemed a credible leader who could carry them out, but was flagrantly immoral, not just in personal ways like affairs but in ways that hurt victims and innocent people, I couldn’t vote for them. I would have to decide that progressive progress would just have to skip this opportunity and work for and hope for a better candidate next time.
But Cesar had seemed to have none of that. He seemed about as close to a human angel as could be. Now… Oh, Cesar.
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