Being Light Bearers
Elie Wiesel was right
Journal: 26 September, 2024, morning.
I read this morning the things that Louisiana Representative Clay Higgins said in a public post on what used to be Twitter.
What a complete embarrassment for the state of Louisiana and for us humans in general. We should all be ashamed, that someone holding public office felt free enough to voice such unfair and dishonest ugliness. I also read that he deleted it, after a public outcry.
Thinking about this, and that Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, House Speaker, said only in response to this “We believe in redemption around here,” I remembered something I read several days ago. It was this:
“… we are living in a Dark Age. And we are not going to see the end of it, nor are our children, nor probably our children’s children. And our job, every single one of us, is to cherish whatever in the human heritage we love and to feed it and keep it going and pass it on, because this Dark Age isn’t going to go on forever, and when it stops those people are gonna need the pieces that we pass on. They’re not going to be able to build a new world without us passing on whatever we can—ideas, art, knowledge, skills, or just plain old fragile love, how we treat people, how we help people: that’s something to be passed on... and all of this passing things on, in all its forms, may not cure the world now—curing the world now may not be a human possibility—but it keeps the great things alive. And we have to do this because, as Laing said, who are we to decide that it is hopeless? And if you want to volunteer for fascinating, dangerous, necessary work, this would be a great job to volunteer for—trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important.”
It’s hard to accept, with the finality that comes with that acceptance, that this battle between darkness and goodness has always been, will always be, and that there is no rest from it, and that there will never be any rest from it. We will have to do this without ceasing, us and our children and their children and their children, on through as many generations as will last on this Earth.
With each new generation born there will always be the ones who choose darkness and death, and we who are light bearers will choose to keep bearing that light.
“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”
Not yet. Not yet.
We who choose to be light bearers should have the courage to speak out when we witness people doing wrong things, to simply say “This is wrong to do, this is cruel, this is ugly, and uncalled for. This is shameful.”
What Clay Higgins did is all of that, and Mike Johnson is wrong to not condemn it. What we do not speak out against we implicitly support.
I think kindness is beautiful and important. I think integrity and fairness and compassion and honesty are beautiful and important. I want to keep those things alive. I want us all to believe in and support those things, embody those things, in everything we say and do. I want the people representing us in public offices to embody those things. And when they don’t, publicly and without any shame or sense of wrongdoing, I want us—all of us—to have the courage to simply stand up and say “This is wrong. You are wrong to do this. Do better. Be better.”
I’m doing that now.
#journalingalife
