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My Dad believes that after we die, we watch a sort of movie of our life in which we see it with total objectivity-- not just what really happened, but without our emotions coloring what we see-- and not only what we did, but how it affected the people around us. Like It's a Wonderful Life, we see what our lives really meant.
I generally think I'm a reasonably good person. I'm flawed, and I have plenty of flaws that I could correct but I don't because I'm selfish or greedy or scared or lazy, but overall I think I have a pretty solid set of values that I do a reasonably good job of living up to. I'm not out saving lives or doing good on a grand scale, but partly that's because I tried being a professional do-gooder, and I found that I was only average at it and I also had a nervous breakdown. So I figured it was probably better for everyone if I devoted myself to becoming an excellent writer, which would be beneficial or at least entertaining for others, rather than by being a so-so doctor or lawyer or disaster relief worker.
I'm not knocking the power of art. I think art is valuable in itself, and can save people's sanity and sustain them in horrible times. And I'm not knocking being nice to the people in one's immediate surroundings.
I don't think that anyone decided to kill the poor people in New Orleans or Mississippi. I think there was a lot of incompetence, and a lot of bad luck. But decisions were made-- to gut FEMA's funding and hire a man with no disaster experience as its head, to plan for a hurricane but make no attempt whatsoever to plan to evacuate people without cars or the sick or the old, to refuse to let rescue workers and people bringing food and water in to help people who were drowning and starving-- that the decision makers knew would result in needless deaths. In legal terms, I believe that's negligent homicide-- you didn't intend to kill someone, but you knew that your action could result in somebody's death and you did it anyway.
I was trying to think of what could possibly be worse than the grand-scale negligent homicide of the last week or so, and since the only thing I could think of was concentration camps, you'll forgive me if I resort to bringing in Nazi analogies. Actually, I think what's going on in America is much more equivalent to some Third World dictatorship or nominal democracy, but since I'm Jewish, when I see horrible things going on, I think of Nazis.
So I don't see the difference between myself and some kindhearted German before WWII, when, let's say, the Jews were locked in their ghettoes but before the organized killing began. She's nice to her friends and she writes her uplifting books and maybe an article or two for an underground newspaper. And some of her friends think what's happening is wrong, and some of them think it's the Jews' own fault because they could have read the writing on the walls and fled, and some of them think bad things are happening but bad things always happen and it's really not such a big deal. And the only people she can convince are the ones who are already convinced. And even though in God's eyes or in mine, she's not at all a bad person, all her niceness and compassion and art and generosity and protest and kindness to others will go up in smoke.
I generally think I'm a reasonably good person. I'm flawed, and I have plenty of flaws that I could correct but I don't because I'm selfish or greedy or scared or lazy, but overall I think I have a pretty solid set of values that I do a reasonably good job of living up to. I'm not out saving lives or doing good on a grand scale, but partly that's because I tried being a professional do-gooder, and I found that I was only average at it and I also had a nervous breakdown. So I figured it was probably better for everyone if I devoted myself to becoming an excellent writer, which would be beneficial or at least entertaining for others, rather than by being a so-so doctor or lawyer or disaster relief worker.
I'm not knocking the power of art. I think art is valuable in itself, and can save people's sanity and sustain them in horrible times. And I'm not knocking being nice to the people in one's immediate surroundings.
I don't think that anyone decided to kill the poor people in New Orleans or Mississippi. I think there was a lot of incompetence, and a lot of bad luck. But decisions were made-- to gut FEMA's funding and hire a man with no disaster experience as its head, to plan for a hurricane but make no attempt whatsoever to plan to evacuate people without cars or the sick or the old, to refuse to let rescue workers and people bringing food and water in to help people who were drowning and starving-- that the decision makers knew would result in needless deaths. In legal terms, I believe that's negligent homicide-- you didn't intend to kill someone, but you knew that your action could result in somebody's death and you did it anyway.
I was trying to think of what could possibly be worse than the grand-scale negligent homicide of the last week or so, and since the only thing I could think of was concentration camps, you'll forgive me if I resort to bringing in Nazi analogies. Actually, I think what's going on in America is much more equivalent to some Third World dictatorship or nominal democracy, but since I'm Jewish, when I see horrible things going on, I think of Nazis.
So I don't see the difference between myself and some kindhearted German before WWII, when, let's say, the Jews were locked in their ghettoes but before the organized killing began. She's nice to her friends and she writes her uplifting books and maybe an article or two for an underground newspaper. And some of her friends think what's happening is wrong, and some of them think it's the Jews' own fault because they could have read the writing on the walls and fled, and some of them think bad things are happening but bad things always happen and it's really not such a big deal. And the only people she can convince are the ones who are already convinced. And even though in God's eyes or in mine, she's not at all a bad person, all her niceness and compassion and art and generosity and protest and kindness to others will go up in smoke.