“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
In third grade we were allowed to take books from the library of our grammar school once a week. The library had been a janitor’s closet. It had one window, metal shelves, a few hundred books. As with many young memories that have been riveted into us, that first view of it is a 3 or 4 second video of south-facing light flooding in from the big window and of the […]
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Yesterday, waiting for a coffee, I glanced up to see an old man who had once done me great harm making his way across a busy intersection. His gait was uncertain, his eyesight perhaps not the best anymore. Hunched over and handling a cane, he watched the cars uneasily. I felt pity for him. Not the self-aggrandizing pity we might feel when our dislike is still burning fiercely. This was […]
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Malice is the custom now, cruelty all the rage, the fashion choice of the powerful set, the chic accessory; for the brown ones are verminous again, that lower bunch, that darker brood, and if that’s too much by a bit for some, they’ll give their practiced shrug and smile and say, oh it will all work out you know, it always does for us, you’ll see, an upset, temporary mess, […]
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I have been trying to write about this for days. Words are not adequate. They create too much distance. William Gass once said that one package of hair collected from a warehouse at Auschwitz has more moral heft and meaning than Hamlet. I cannot stop thinking of the 165 children and of their teachers at the Shajarah Tayyebeh school who were torn to pieces by a US missile. These are their graves. […]
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