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Beautiful piece, Laurie. Thank you for writing it.

Principles aren't really principles in fair weather. In fact, principles only reveal themselves when they are difficult—even seemingly impossible—to adhere to.

These principles of compassion, of common humanity, and of individual dignity are most important in times like these—when it seems that every incentive, every emotion, and every argument is compelling us to dehumanize, to vilify, to flatten one another into symbols and abstractions.

When everyone around you has lost their minds, that’s when it’s most important to keep yours. When everyone around you has hardened their hearts, that’s when it’s most important to open yours.

As we have seen with Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Daryl Davis, and countless others: When we counter inhumanity with humanity, when we respond to hatred and anger with compassion and grace, when we insist on nuance in the face of oversimplification, we are truly living the principles of fairness, understanding, and humanity that we espouse.

Doing this doesn't just open a window for change in others where there was once a brick wall. It also prevents us from becoming that brick wall ourselves.

Looking forward to reading and hearing more from you, Laurie. Thanks again for the excellent piece.

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Ps. James Baldwin was an antiSemite. So not buying that he’s a hero in any moral sense.

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Sure, then let's think about tearing down Hitler. Hitler was an individual person with full human dignity. When people teared him down, they might feel like they are tearing down a symbol of something—white supremacy, antisemitic power—but they are not. They are tearing down pictures of specific individuals with full human dignity.

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November 27, 2023
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I’d like to underscore a conflation that keeps popping up in this conversation and others.

Not one thing in this piece, and not one thing I have ever said or advocated for here or elsewhere *ever in my life* has even remotely insinuated that one should lay down and tolerate abuse, excuse or allow violence, or put flowers in gun barrels while singing Kumbaya over the screams of tortured victims.

Rebuttals to what I advocate for almost always seem to jump straight to physical violence and war, which are *very different contexts* where conversation and productive engagement are clearly no longer possible.

But those are not the contexts being referred to here, and we do ourselves and our causes a disservice when we are too quick to assume we’re in those contexts at any given time. That’s the conflation in question, and it is a hair-trigger response many people have that causes a number of problems for progress on these issues.

Here, we are talking about people and circumstances where perspectives, opinions, and understandings collide. The whole point is to have tools and tactics for engaging in these contexts so that we don’t get to the point where productive dialogue is impossible. You may think people who believe or espouse certain things are too far gone, and as a result are purely evil and beyond intervention—but you have to remember that many people believe the same thing about you, and people like Daryl Davis prove just how much is possible when you *don’t* assume a person is too far gone.

People do, say, and believe awful and ugly things. I don’t deny that one bit. I never have. The question is about how best to deal with those things, and it depends on the behavior, beliefs, and contexts in question.

Anyone who breaks into my home or tries to physically harm me or my loved ones will learn very quickly that I’m not a pacifist. But if they simply believe ugly things, or espouse them, or exhibit behaviors that result from a warped view of the world, then how I respond is and should be different.

And it’s very important—if we wish to be effective in our advocacy and true to our principles of fairness, understanding, and humanity—to be able to tell the difference. Don't be so certain that you always can.

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Penny, I totally agree with you. I just made a very similar comment above, so take a look. As I noted, my son-in-law is in the reserves in the north, my daughter is in Jerusalem, they have four little children, and they are all shaken by the evil that has befallen their people. They are not at all full of hate -- never! -- but towards those who support Hamas in any way I have no tolerance. Evil is evil.

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I can’t agree with you strongly enough. There’s something dead inside, or seriously narcissistic here. A genocidal massacre (still ongoing - the dead and gang rapes not yet counted and catalogued, the gravely wounded fighting for their lives, and the kidnapped civilians not yet returned) is met by a sophomoric essay about literature, some scolding about principles and some grandmotherly advice straight from an after school special.

I just don’t understand why we can’t all press flowers together and hold hands and pray for world peace? Let’s teach Hamas all about symbolism - I’m sure the UNRWA schools we fund had a semester right between Mein Kampf and weapons training.

Let’s all write saccharine marshmallows pablum, in the college library, with the scared, hiding Jewish students, so the baying mob pounding on the windows and doors, knows that we’re harmless and saintly and oh-so sweet and gooey inside! A+

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