This post will be a bunch of quotations from a great man. Words that I think are very important in these times when we seem to be suffering from a very dangerous lack of outrage.
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
Not a new sentiment (see “bread and circuses”, “…that good men should do nothing”, and the lyrics of Neil Peart).
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Our society provides us with myriad distractions from things that matter–it’s an institutional effect of being a society focused on consumption. If that wasn’t enough, we are societally trained to think of ourselves as powerless. We’re supposed to think of the government as “they”, not “us”–something we aren’t involved in and have no influence over. So we fall into a distracted apathy… and our lives begin to end.
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and consciencious stupidity.”
Paging the neocons… Paging Mr. “I don’t read the news” President.
“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”
Sometimes I look at events in the history of my nation–the mistreatment of the native peoples, the detention of the asian Canadians during WWII, the history of Africville here in Halifax, etc and I am ashamed. How, I wonder, could my parents, my grandparents, have let this happen? Why didn’t the do something about it?
How do you think our children will look on the mess we helped make in Afghanistan and then more or less abandoned? How will they look on the fact that our government has made no real effort to change what happened, and happens, in Iraq? What do we tell them when they ask how things like Abu Ghraib could happen without us saying a word? Or if Harper gets his way and the notwithstanding clause is used to deny the rights of homosexuals? What do I tell my daughter when she asks why I let this happen?
Oh, and the man I’ve been quoting? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We are still doomed to repeat history, until that day–and I hope it comes–when we finally learn from it.
