Saving power
"Nations are saved if there is a small minority, a group of
people, who represent what the nation is called to be. They may be defeated,
but their spirit will be a power of resistance against the evil spirits who are
detrimental to the nation. The question of saving power in the nation is the
question of whether there is a minority, even a small one, which is willing to
resist the anxiety produced by propaganda, the conformity enforced by threat,
the hatred stimulated by ignorance. The future of this country and its
spiritual values is not dependent as much on atomic defense as on the influence
such groups will have on the spirit in which the nation will think and act."--Paul Tillich, theologian, The Eternal Now, 1959
September 1, 1939
ReplyDeleteW. H. Auden, 1907 - 1973
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.