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The beautifully lived life of Jo Cox (A tribute written by a friend of hers)
I can’t claim to speak for Jo, or even to describe her life or politics in fine detail. Although we had times of closeness – when we worked together, at her wedding, when we climbed wet, cold Scottish Munroe’s – we had not been very close in recent years. I moved jobs and countries, she became a mother for the second time, then an MP. Busy lives all round.
What I do know about Jo is really very simple. She was driven by a clean and unambiguous desire to make life better for those battered and beaten and punished by this world. It sounds glib, almost too saccharine for a real person, but I can assure you it’s true. She was a humanitarian, through and through. To her bones. It wasn’t complicated and it didn’t waiver. The Jo I first met working for Oxfam twelve years ago is exactly and entirely consistent with the Jo who went on to lead a global campaign on maternal health, who used her maiden speech in the House of Commons to call for humane treatment of Syrian refugees, and who has been a powerful voice for a humane and compassionate approach to immigration in the year since. In the chaotic and swirling morass of politics, Jo’s values stood firm and unchanging. Simple, predictable, undeniable.
And maybe that’s what Jo’s death can remind us. Can remind me. The final simplicity of our lives. The final simplicity of the hopes that undergird our passions. The final simplicity of love; it’s brilliance all the more striking against the black, chaotic rage that seems to have killed her.
MORE HERE: http://yonside.com/beautifully-lived-life-jo-cox/
What I do know about Jo is really very simple. She was driven by a clean and unambiguous desire to make life better for those battered and beaten and punished by this world. It sounds glib, almost too saccharine for a real person, but I can assure you it’s true. She was a humanitarian, through and through. To her bones. It wasn’t complicated and it didn’t waiver. The Jo I first met working for Oxfam twelve years ago is exactly and entirely consistent with the Jo who went on to lead a global campaign on maternal health, who used her maiden speech in the House of Commons to call for humane treatment of Syrian refugees, and who has been a powerful voice for a humane and compassionate approach to immigration in the year since. In the chaotic and swirling morass of politics, Jo’s values stood firm and unchanging. Simple, predictable, undeniable.
And maybe that’s what Jo’s death can remind us. Can remind me. The final simplicity of our lives. The final simplicity of the hopes that undergird our passions. The final simplicity of love; it’s brilliance all the more striking against the black, chaotic rage that seems to have killed her.
MORE HERE: http://yonside.com/beautifully-lived-life-jo-cox/
