thread: 2006-09-08 : Salvation, damnation, justification, a la Sydney
On 2006-09-12, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Joshua: I'm not aiming to be a saint. I don't want to be perfect. I'm not a rapist or a torturer or a murderer. I've never sold drugs to kids. I've never made money from the munitions or tobacco industries. I've never been a party to genocide, war, enslavement or child abuse. At the end of the day, the worst thing I've generally done is made someone I care about feel lousy, because I lost my temper or I was feeling spiteful.
Joshua, with all due respect, you're setting out a really, really low standard here. And "at the end of the day," I'd guess that the vast majority of human suffering is the result, not of some act of historic evil or grotesque criminality, but of ordinary people being unpleasant to each other. It adds up.
My wife and I both have plenty of unhappiness in our families, and there's not a child abuser or tobacco industry executive on either side for as far back as either of us knows about. (Okay, my mom is dating a retired tobacco exec, but that's a recent thing, it doesn't impact our lives particularly). But nevertheless there was enough ordinary human misery, of the largely self-inflicted variety, for us to look at each other and our daughter and say, "this shit stops rolling downhill as of now."
