Ingrid Betancourt

I don't always catch what is coming up on the blog list as it updates automatically. Anyway, I missed Ann Althouse's comment on Ingrid Betancourt until it came up in the comments. The article that inspired it is here and if you read nothing else this Sunday ....

Like Althouse, I was struck by Betancourt's stand for dignity in refusing to accept her captors requirement that they be known by numbers not names:

"I had a problem," she says. "I had this belief that I couldn’t just accept to be treated as an object. It was a problem of dignity." She says her fellow hostages saw her behavior as arrogance or troublemaking. "But it wasn’t that. It was just that I couldn’t accept that they would call us by number, because I thought it would make it easier for them to kill us if they had to kill an object, a number."

And the way it relates to her choices to live in a certain way now that she is free but Alhouse cuts the quote short before something really important comes up, God:

Betancourt says she made some immediate decisions about her new life: First, she would wear perfume every day; second, she would never deny herself the opportunity to eat cake.

"I promised to have ice cream in my diet, and I promised to change my priorities," she says.  In the jungle, one of the few books Betancourt had access to was the Bible, and she read it over and over again.  One passage stuck out:  "It says that when you cross the valley of tears, and you arrive to the oasis, the reward of God is not success, it’s not money, it’s not admiration or fame, it’s not power. His reward is rest. So that’s what I want for me now."

 I think Althouse means for us to notice the perfume and she is right to do so. Betancourt doesn't mean to be free as a human being, she means to be free as a woman. That's a good thing to highlight. But the God stuff is more important and I bet Betancourt sees them as connected: "Man and woman he created them."

Not unrelated, some day I should explain why I admire Marie Antoinette.