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(I think of James Baldwin, who observed in his terrific conversation with Nikki Giovanni: “What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. When these dominant narratives become so deeply embedded in a society, Le Guin suggests, even those whom they oppress end up internalizing them. The institution was abolished, but the mind of the master and the mind of the slave still think a good many of the thoughts of America. The second American revolution, the Civil War, was an attempt to preserve slavery. Many of those who made the first revolution practiced the most extreme form of economic exploitation and social oppression: they were slave owners. The first revolution was a protest against galling, stupid, but relatively mild social and economic exploitation. My country came together in one revolution and was nearly broken by another. In an ennobling and pleasurably unnerving essay titled “A War Without End,” which Le Guin describes as “some thoughts, written down at intervals, about oppression, revolution, and imagination,” she writes: Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) examines in one of the many magnificent pieces in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination ( public library) - that trove of her clear-headed, bright-hearted wisdom on subjects as eclectic and essential as gender, the sacredness of public libraries, the magic of real human conversation, and what beauty really means.
How, then, do we unmoor ourselves from a passivity we so masterfully rationalize, remember that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and rise to that awareness with moral courage and imagination? Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” And yet part of the human tragedy is that despite our best intentions and our most ardent ideals, we often lull ourselves into neutrality in the face of injustice - be it out of fear for our own stability, or lack of confidence in our ability to make a difference, or that most poisonous foible of the soul, the two-headed snake of cynicism and apathy. “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
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“We must always take sides,” Elie Wiesel urged in his spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech.