Today in the midst of world conflict walks a woman who, like Eleanor Roosevelt, could not be content. She is a woman who has weighed her love for her family against her love for her country. Each time she has chosen her country. And now she is the first woman to run for president in Chile.
I first learned of Michelle Bachelet while thumbing through The Oprah Magazine. Intermixed between pages extolling perfect skin, folded perfume ads and interviews with movie stars was tucked the story of Michelle. Her life trivializes the very things that many American women spend countless hours worrying about. After having thumbed through the whole magazine devouring all the juicer articles I finally decided to read about “The Mom Who Would Be President.”
In the early 1970s, under the sadistic dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Michelle and her parents, Alberto and Angela Bachelet, received their first warning of how arbitrary and cruel Pinochet’s regime could be. Alberto, a brigadier general in the air force, was falsely accused of treason, detained, tortured and then released.
Afterward Alberto’s and Angela’s immediate concern was that of their daughter Michelle. They considered moving their family into exile. They were fortunate enough to have the opportunity and means of escape when so many of their fellow countrymen did not.
Michelle, still a teenager, encouraged her parents to stay. The window of opportunity was slammed shut when her father was again detained and died as a result of the torture he endured. Michelle and her mother also were arrested and underwent months of torture until the government was pressured for their release.
Escaping to Australia and then Germany, Michelle still had no desire to cut her losses and lead a normal life. She encouraged a close friend to go back to Chile. He too was subsequently killed.
The words of Eleanor Roosevelt resonate in Michelle’s story, “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
But personally, I had to wonder, how could Michelle live with that kind of guilt? How many times could she look fear in the face? How could she put her principles ahead of her family’s safety? But it was my own narrow definition of family that led me to question her loyalties.
What is so remarkable is that she saw her family as more than its tiny nuclear components of father, mother and siblings. Her family was Chile. How could she tuck tail and run, leaving behind her own kindred to face oppression, torture and even possible death under a sadistic dictator?
As soon as Michelle earned her medical degree in her early 20s, she moved back to Chile to work in public medicine. In 2000 she became minister of health and then defense minister in 2002. Michelle is now running for president.
She is a divorced mother of three in a conservative Catholic country. Yet oddly enough, she has upset the norm. In the elections on Dec. 11, she took 46 percent of the votes, beating both of the ultra-right opponents. She would have needed 50 percent to claim victory, and the runoffs will be held sometime this month. The two opponents have decided to combine forces to create one candidate in hopes of defeating Michelle.
In a world of blinders where magazine headlines read “Throwing a party that’s absolutely beyond,” “Let’s Talk About Sex,” “16 thoughts that will make you thin” and “Take Pleasure,” I have to wonder: Are we really that shallow? Would I have bought the magazine with the teaser, “Michelle Bachelet, First woman to run for President in Chile”?
Where do we draw the line between indifference and contentment? And in our indifference, will we ever experience “the kind of calm which comes when one has done the best one can”? Without a doubt Eleanor Roosevelt was speaking of the truest contentment.
Win or lose in January 2006, the outcome is the same. Michelle Bachelet has done her very best.
Ellen Marcus is an Aberdeen freelance writer. She may be reached at ekmarcus@
alltel.net
