Compelling questions of forgiveness. I keep thinking of Tutu and Mandela's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa. Tutu says that forgiveness isn't even really altruistic: "If you can find it in yourself to forgive, then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator." I'm not coming down on one side of Ukrainians forgiving Russia or not; but one of my favorite glimmers of protest against Putin is the hair color of one of the Atlanta Symphony's violinists: blue on one side and her natural blonde on the other, the flag of her native Ukraine, a visual reminder that this war is still going on while Nero fiddles.
An interesting take, which I agree with. Forgiving is like giving: we classically view it as enrichment of the recipient; but it is in fact, if only folk realised it, an enrichment of the bestower.
I need to think about your violinist, for reasons that go off topic. I'll go off topic with you, if you wish, but I don't think the hair colour is a protest against Putin, not qualitate qua. It is an assertion of right, rather protest at what's wrong. It's what we have learned to know about Ukraine: stalwart, stoical, honourable, upright, valorous; and, just a tad, unbelievable.
May I quote me?
"The spirit that once lived vibrantly in the wake of apartheid, in the truth and reconciliation that was viewed as an essential cathartic process for South Africa, and, in a similar style, which is being embraced in Chile as it strives to lay to rest the ghosts of Pinochet’s coup d’état before those with lived recollection are themselves laid to rest, and the spirit of right for right’s sake as demonstrated recently in Ecuador’s banishment of further oil & gas exploration there (whose truth must be hoped for, regardless of how good it seems to be), all these tokens of openness and honesty have been walked back to the point where the distinctive clarity of a defined threshold no longer always convinces."
Compelling questions of forgiveness. I keep thinking of Tutu and Mandela's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa. Tutu says that forgiveness isn't even really altruistic: "If you can find it in yourself to forgive, then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator." I'm not coming down on one side of Ukrainians forgiving Russia or not; but one of my favorite glimmers of protest against Putin is the hair color of one of the Atlanta Symphony's violinists: blue on one side and her natural blonde on the other, the flag of her native Ukraine, a visual reminder that this war is still going on while Nero fiddles.
An interesting take, which I agree with. Forgiving is like giving: we classically view it as enrichment of the recipient; but it is in fact, if only folk realised it, an enrichment of the bestower.
I need to think about your violinist, for reasons that go off topic. I'll go off topic with you, if you wish, but I don't think the hair colour is a protest against Putin, not qualitate qua. It is an assertion of right, rather protest at what's wrong. It's what we have learned to know about Ukraine: stalwart, stoical, honourable, upright, valorous; and, just a tad, unbelievable.
May I quote me?
"The spirit that once lived vibrantly in the wake of apartheid, in the truth and reconciliation that was viewed as an essential cathartic process for South Africa, and, in a similar style, which is being embraced in Chile as it strives to lay to rest the ghosts of Pinochet’s coup d’état before those with lived recollection are themselves laid to rest, and the spirit of right for right’s sake as demonstrated recently in Ecuador’s banishment of further oil & gas exploration there (whose truth must be hoped for, regardless of how good it seems to be), all these tokens of openness and honesty have been walked back to the point where the distinctive clarity of a defined threshold no longer always convinces."
https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/every-little-counts