Several months ago, I was listening to a political debate where a well-respected journalist mentioned a particular issue as being her “hill to die on.” I won’t go into the issue or the journalist, as my reason for this narrative is neither to defend nor support any particular political debate, but rather to analyze those things on which we are ready to defend with total conviction, regardless of the outcome. We’ve all heard the phrase and, no doubt, have used it in some way throughout our lives.
But for whatever reason, on this day, it hit me most profoundly. Looking back on my own life, I considered the situations in which I had been certain that I was right; dead, nothing to compromise, with no room for any other perspective. Perhaps I’ve reached the stage in life when, looking back at all those dead-right perspectives, I now ask the question, “How did that work out for you, Carolyne?” I then began to question what such a viewpoint really was about. Was it about selflessness or selfishness? But hard as I tried, I couldn’t get beyond the question of why anyone dies for a cause. Would it not be better to continue service to the cause rather than in the fashion of a Kamikaze pilot going down in flames to a certain death? I decided that to die in the act of carrying out one’s cause is not the same as a purpose to sacrifice. For example, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood the risks associated with his calling, even forecasting his possible death. The tragedy of his assassination was associated with those risks, not because he wanted to die for them. He wanted to live; we know this because he had bodyguards to protect him.
In my further research, I was directed to Wilhelm Stekel, an Austrian psychologist, whose quote appears in the book The Catcher in the Rye. “The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause; the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
Sitting down at my computer, I decided to write down some of the discussions that I was having with myself to get a better handle on my interpersonal thoughts. Three months later, I stopped writing upon seeing I had the makings of a 52,000-word story, and today I introduce to you, The Contradiction of Martyrs, releasing on Amazon on March 1, 2026.
