PeteFree.comTrouble, eventually, will find us — the more aware we are, the sooner so
© 2021 Peter Free
20 May 2021
Today, I move from a general moral observation . . .
. . . to why that observation may matter.
At least to a few people.
Most folks lead comparatively unexamined lives
Living is, generally speaking, a reflexive act. Not one subject to notably prominent moral pondering. Despite what the United States' flaunted religiosity claims.
As a result, Hannah Arendt's definition of evil slips in through both front and back doors — when and while no one cares, or is perceptive enough to lock it out.
Politicians and plutocrats count upon this moral blindness. They wheel their barrows of Injustice and Imposed Suffering along the approved societal highways that we have granted them free passage on.
So it is, for instance, while the United States assists in killing Yemenis and Palestinians for no defensible reasons, other to profit plutocrats, despoilers and the inhumanly self-righteous.
What is one to do?
I came across the following words from Chris Hedges, yesterday:
To resist evil is the highest achievement of human life. It is the supreme act of love.
It is to carry the cross, as the theologian James Cone [see here] reminds us. And to be acutely aware that what we are carrying is what we will die upon.
[Resistance] is an act of faith.
© 2021 Reflection of Passion, Chris Hedges — The American Empire Will Collapse within a Decade or Two at Most, YouTube (15 May 2021) (quote beginning at 50:28 minutes)
One need not interpret what Hedges said in Christian . . .
. . . or even markedly religious terms.
His two opening sentences are hard to dispute on simple ethical and psychological principle. "Cross" in the third, can simply be the situationally representative manner in which we die. Either having been courageous and decent, or cowardly and corrupted.
As for "faith", one can trim that word's generally Protestant meaning. Semantically broadening it to signify one's understanding that an upright human core will not buckle to Absurdity and Cruelty.
Thus, the act of resisting evil defines the most soulful form of humanity. Soul-defining, given resistance's mandatory requirements in sharp-seeing moral acuity and strong and sacrificing spine.
The moral? — Evil's trouble finds us
What we do then, arguably defines which soul-bucket we are in.
Kindness and courage are, perhaps, a human being's two most glowing attributes. In demonstrating both, the word "halo" is, often enough, not completely out of place.