Peter, that novel has stuck with me ever since my Mom read it to us when I was about 10 and my sister 6. We are both on either our second or third copies of the book, and both read in regularly.
What you tell helps me and other readers better to understand your outlook, your motivation.
For many years now I've been turning over in my mind what it means to have been a victim, the dangers that go with victimhood, especially when victim status becomes an integral part of a person's or a group's identity.
It seems to me that the greatest harm of all arises when the victim is indelibly marked by the evil sustained. The victim then places her or himself outside the law, at the service of whatever vengeance may demand.
Yet, wherever a society is deeply divided, by debased notions of individualism, by racism, by social stratification based on wealth and income, by affiliation tribal, whether the tribe's identity is religious, political or whatever, by all the variations on "us" and "them", that entire society falls victim to its divisions. The have-nots are victims of their deprivation, the haves are had by their having (instead of living and being). We are so often not the masters but the victims of our ideas and our emotions...
A never-ending tale of ultimately unnecessary suffering and unkindness, both inflicted and self-inflicted.
Yet kindness, the lovingkindness that would share such happiness as we find, seems so simple, so obvious.
"I would share my ease and not my disease," said Thoreau.
I am just completing my long-belated reading of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Not surprised that the crazed ideologues want to ban it, to burn it.
Truth must be uprooted and consigned to the flames of hatred.
And this book tells truths far too actual.
In America.
In Israel.
Worldwide.
Peter, that novel has stuck with me ever since my Mom read it to us when I was about 10 and my sister 6. We are both on either our second or third copies of the book, and both read in regularly.
What you tell helps me and other readers better to understand your outlook, your motivation.
For many years now I've been turning over in my mind what it means to have been a victim, the dangers that go with victimhood, especially when victim status becomes an integral part of a person's or a group's identity.
It seems to me that the greatest harm of all arises when the victim is indelibly marked by the evil sustained. The victim then places her or himself outside the law, at the service of whatever vengeance may demand.
Yet, wherever a society is deeply divided, by debased notions of individualism, by racism, by social stratification based on wealth and income, by affiliation tribal, whether the tribe's identity is religious, political or whatever, by all the variations on "us" and "them", that entire society falls victim to its divisions. The have-nots are victims of their deprivation, the haves are had by their having (instead of living and being). We are so often not the masters but the victims of our ideas and our emotions...
A never-ending tale of ultimately unnecessary suffering and unkindness, both inflicted and self-inflicted.
Yet kindness, the lovingkindness that would share such happiness as we find, seems so simple, so obvious.
"I would share my ease and not my disease," said Thoreau.