And where do we go from here? Whatever tomorrow brings, we have reached a turning point in road. I have, at times, been in despair of our inaction, our selfishness and our moral cowardice. This powerful quote by Jane Smiley expresses in a few words what I have spent years trying to say.
She writes, " Dictatorships do horrible things, and their citizens are employed to do them, but for a self-advertised democracy to do horrible things seems to me a lot worse -- we are all implicated. We can never walk away from crimes that we failed to prevent, because as citizens of a democracy, it was our job to prevent them."
Like Ms. Smiley, (Please read her post at the link above.) I have often been so angry that I wished the worst would happen. I have wished that our iniquity would become so apparent that the scales would fall from the eyes of even the most reptilian of us. I wished that the result of our arrogance would bring us to our knees, because from that lowly position we might begin to realize a different perspective of what is true and right and moral.
So, now we wait. May the best man win.
- Lois Margaret Elizabeth Carneiro
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