The National Empathy Divide

[mgc1961]

"The loose network among relatives offers the grim solace of knowing that others too have suffered the same curse."

Every terrible rift is the occasion for peace and the place for the peacemaker. And often peace is nothing more, at first, than connecting, pulling the injured or ostracized back into the social circle and the beginning the process of healing.

Peace is not a state of "perpetual pre-hostility," as it has been described by military strategists - that is to say, perpetual armed readiness and checkpoints and unending displays of superior force, eventually and inevitably lapsing into horrific violence. That may be the state of the world, but it's not peace, nor is it sustainable. It's the downward cycle in which we are caught - and in which we fully and enthusiastically participate, with bloated national defense budgets and uncounted trillions spent globally to stay armed, terrified and isolated.

Yet as my friend David Nekimken pointed out, while the policies of what Dr. Martin Luther King called "spiritual death" may be all around us, if we look we can also see "spiritual life" glowing from within the dark.

Read on at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/27-3

[Zoeisright]

1. Here's the real empathy divide:

Democrats care about other people. Repukes don't.