I really love Bill Moyers

Please go on over to Common Dreams and read the Baccalaureate address by Bill Moyers to the graduating class of Hamilton College. It is truly moving. It really needs to be read in its entirety (it is short) as I can't do it justice with an excerpt. But I do want to give you these two paragraphs:

The hardest struggle of all is to reconcile life's polar realities. I love books, Beethoven, and chocolate brownies. Yet how do I justify my pleasure in these in a world where millions are illiterate, the music never plays, and children go hungry through the night? How do I live sanely in a world so unsafe for so many?

I don't know what they taught you here at Hamilton about all this, but I trust you are not leaving here without thinking about how you will respond to the dissonance in our culture, the rivalry between beauty and bestiality in the world, and the conflicts in your own soul. All of us have to choose sides on this journey. But the question is not so much who we are going to fight against as it is which side of our own nature will we nurture: The side that can grow weary and even cynical and believe that everything is futile, or the side that for all the vulgarity, brutality, and cruelty, yearns to affirm, connect and signify. Albert Camus got it right: There is beauty in the world as well as humiliation, and we have to strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful...in the presence of one or the other."

There is beauty in the world in spite of everything. Last night I watched American Experience on PBS which was about Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister. The entire show was in his own words - from his diaries - and it was chilling, truly chilling. What sickened me is how much his time was like our own - the nationalism, the scapegoating and persecution of minorities, the militarism, the wars of aggression and, of course, the propaganda. We are living through a terrible time and yet there is beauty in the world. I remember that every day. Let us remember it together.