But he always promised me that he'd come back. I never thought it would be in a box, though. She spoke of his love for the outdoors, his skill in tracking animals, making pottery, making moccasins. He wanted nothing more than to do what was right. It's easy to be glib about activists.
Activists can come across as self-righteous, compulsively narrow in their focus, humorless.
At times they can seem hopelessly ineffectual, steeped in the private vocabulary of the reports that they exchange at conferences. Precisely because Freitas was willing to take risks for which I was unprepared, I felt not only shocked by his death, but chastened. Freitas was enchanted by the U'wa, by their avowed aversion to violence, by their funky animism. He would have been 25 this month. He loved Sarah McLachlan and Ani diFranco.