Footnotes and Scare Quotes

Sharing this opinion piece because I think it captures the scene so well.   Over the past several months I’ve been working on fully internalizing the idea that two people can disagree drastically on politics without either of the two people involved being stupid (or poorly influenced, or badly motivated, or whatever). A lot of it came down to accepting a difference in people’s order of priorities when good principles conflict with each other.  Unfortunately, we as Americans can’t easily scratch that itch and have that kind of uniting self-reflection when our media leads the way with a tribal, self-loving, disconnected, selective devotion to non-questioning and an amazing propensity to ask the wrong people what their opinions are. 

 I'm sharing here a chapter from the book I referred to earlier. Thousands of observations on the "front lines," so-to-speak. And he drew these conclusions in 1999. 

A few weeks ago I read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I definitely would recommend it, and I have a lot of respect for a man or woman who steps up and dedicates their life to helping fix something wrong. Someone who decides to be a stone catcher. It is a problem when justice depends on how good your lawyer is, to say the very least. I don’t accept some of the claims sprinkled in the book, expressed as a matter of obvious fact when in reality they are his opinion or interpretation. But the respect and admiration remains.  Having read Hillbilly Elegy in the same year (also a major endorsement), I am now devouring the following book written by a psychiatrist in the slums of Britain. He has had thousands of patients in the hospital and prison where he works, and he has collected his many observations in it, topic by topic, all related to what turns the lower class into a lower caste. Just as compelling and heartbreaking as the first two books, with thousands of observed lives to back i...