But neither am I a warlord. Combat, whether physical, inteleectual or emotional, must be a last resort and carefully chosen repsonse.
We do need to listen and to try to understand and to take from each other those things that are valuable and which are usable, no matter who thinks of them, and put them to use to make a better community.
We do not need to straddle a fence – we need to tear the fence down and forget about “our side” and “their side.”
I look at the society we have today and I see similarities with another in history. I see not the Roman culture that we so often compare ourselves with, but another; one that had a devastated economy; one whose population felt disenfranchised and surrounded by enemies; one in which anger and frustration and fear gave birth to an intolerance unlike any we had seen before, and hopefully will never see again: Germany.
We say it cannot happen here, but that is the greatest danger of all.
Look around and you will see no shortage of scapegoats and targets, and you will find much of the same rhetoic used by that party 70 years ago to accomlpish its ends.
I hear a lot of people complain that the reason there is not peace in the Middle East is that neither Israel nor the Palestinians want peace; they want only war until the last remaining enemy is annihilated.
It isn’t the economy, nor is it terrorism or secularism or religion or Republicanism or Democratism or conservatism or liberalism that is our greatest threat. It is our own refusal to allow ourselves the liberty of our own convictions while allowing others the liberty of theirs.
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