I mentioned that I am currently reading Daniel Ellsberg's "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"; I came across another comment from that book, when the author is describing the first peace action he went to, which struck me:
"Actually I was ambivalent. In fact I could agree with most of what I was hearing. My reservations about being there were not so much about what the speakers were saying—it seemed to me they were on solid ground even if they didn’t have inside information—as about possibly having my picture taken. I would have been glad if all this could have had enough influence to get the bombing stopped and put a lid on our involvement. But Patricia and her friends didn’t know any of that."
I want to repeat the phrase that caught my attention:
"even if they didn’t have inside information"
We all have a conscience - true, in some people it is either smothered under a layer of wilful indifference falsely described as "atrophied" or caked over with warped and evil views, but it is always there, and, in its truest form, it is reasonably in tune with our Higher Self. (I am aware many of the layers of distortion I alluded to begin in childhood, so that it may not seem to be the case, but it is, when one strips away the evil parts of social conditioning.)
We know that because of the self justifications indulged in by many who commit evil, self justifications applied again and again and gain in a vain attempt to self hypnotise oneself into a different reality, one where those evils are somehow "acceptable".
There are torturers who have cried while doing the will of evil; there are soldiers who took part in mass murder who are traumatised by seeing the evil they are doing - neither are as badly affected as their victims, of course, but their damage and their need for self hypnosis, preferably in a group to share the blame, speaks to the inner knowledge that what they are doing is wrong.
(When it doesn't, we are dealing with a psychopath, a being devoid of empathy who could be considered an embodiment of evil.)
We don't necessarily have to get a report outlining carefully what is happening, what the evidence is, and why actions are right or wrong - we do for legal action and holding people to account in the physical world, in order to ensure fairness rather than gossip or vengeance, but morally ... we have no such excuse.
The better parts of ourself - the better angels of our nature, to use the phrase Lincoln borrowed, polished, and made famous (see here, and here), know that having an unearned advantage through the vagaries of one's birth (also called privilege) is not right, nor is condemning people or assuming characteristics on the basis of innocent aspects they have no particular control over (such as the colour of their skin, the sexual preference/gender identity that their genes have given them, or any of a range of characteristics used to arbitrarily assign people to outsider minorities), nor is profound inequality and the things that come out of that such as extreme poverty.
I am of the opinion that many people try to deny such horrors, or turn away, or try to justify inaction (e.g., "charity starts at home" - to which the proper reply is "but it doesn't stop there") because we know that what we are seeing is wrong.
We may also fear not being able to help or do enough to make a difference: that is where the knowledge in reports can help, but the first act, the first tiny baby step, is acknowledging what is wrong in what we are seeing.
Don't turn your face away: be brave, allow your heart to be wounded by another's pain, and thus have the courage to truly be human.
