Force versus freedom as a means...

For everyone who is unconvinced of how force undermines a cause, I would highly recommend Soldiers in the Army of God, the brilliant HBO documentary on the most violent wing of the anti-abortion movement...

It's amazing how these folks can seem so normal in every other way except in their willingness to rationalize the most serious violence and force and harm to accomplish their ends...

Most people wouldn't go so far, I imagine...

But how sad that any of us would measure ourselves as just less extreme than such fanatics...

Or any fanatics, for that matter...

The most serious mistake in free societies, I think, is how we will rationalize the primacy of being right on any particular issue over the freedom of people to choose without being imposed upon...to make judgments out of their genuinely free will...

There are many, many times that I doubt whether this is the course that humanity will choose...or whether they will continue to rationalize all the hurt and pain and threats and fear that they impose on one another...

And then I remember Bobby Kennedy's impromptu eulogy for Martin Luther King... "My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: 'Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God'...

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country...

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

The natural course of humanity...

To tame the savageness of man...and make more gentle the life of this world...

Love,
Ben