Advance or retreat?
A few of us were standing in the office recently, discussing how best to resolve some persistently inconvenient but ultimately trivial operating issue, when the conversation turned more macro, trying to comprehend the latest daily atrocity and, more so, those trying to rationalize the indefensible. After a few moments of shared despair, one of my colleagues said, “well, we can wallow or we can act, what’s your vote?”
Feeling unmoored and desensitized as inhumanity, injustice and irrationality seemingly cascade down and geyser up on us simultaneously can be easily justified.
But inaction is a choice. A poor one. One that hands our individual and collective power to others.
Let’s choose wisely. Lives depend on it.
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. - Frederick Douglass
“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.” - William Faulkner
So well said, and perfectly understated. Let's stop choosing poorly.