I wouldn’t have wanted censorship, and I wouldn’t have wanted personal attacks. But I very much did want and had hoped for public statements, especially by the moderators who are constantly deciding what is acceptable and what is not at KivaFriends, but also, statements from some of the active and especially veteran members of the Forum, something to the effect of “
Not in Our Forum .”
It’s one thing to condemn the immoral actions of governments and even the silence and apparent acquiescence of large numbers of the citizenry of those countries in the face of those actions. I get terrifically angry, disillusioned, and more than anything, deeply saddened, myself, when I hear of various acts committed by my own country's government and by Israel's, among others.
But for me, it’s quite another thing to broadbrush paint entire groups of people, whether of a similar religion, skin color, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation or whatever as though all people were alike and could be “known” and judged, based merely on some physical attribute or some other classificatory parameter over which they had little or no control or that tells nothing of what is in their hearts or how they, as individuals, conduct their lives.
I really really wish you guys had spoken up. I know of many of the reasons why people would choose not to, including, probably, “
the less said the better .”
In connection with that explanation, and in connection with a whole lot of other things, I’d ask you to watch the five minute video that follows that’s about a story I first learned about in the early 90’s. I'd actually taped a segment off Charles Kuralt's CBS Sunday Morning show that highlighted it. I was then able to use it as a teaching tool with elementary and junior high school kids. The original segment was incredibly powerful. A brick that had been thrown through a child's bedroom window just missed the pillow where the kid lay sleeping, maybe by inches. I felt that there was a lesson in it for all of us, and that it didn't matter one whit which group was being attacked "this week."
http://www.pbs.org/niot/about/niot1.html The last link is one I chanced on, this morning, when a particular quote came to mind, because of all this, and I wanted to re-read it and understand its origins .http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/niem.htm Jill
I’d actually started to write Bala a personal message to try to keep this from being perpetuated any further on the Forum’s pages. But since a particular sentiment now stands written, then referenced, a total of five times, already, the thought occurred to me that I didn’t want people coming to “my” Forum, seeing those lines, and then thinking that nobody here really very much cared.
