Responsible Bravery
For the listener, humility humanizes the speaker, it decreases the sense of threat, it lowers the fear of harm, it beckons benefit of the doubt.
Humility creates a better chance of being able to address hate without perpetuating it. To confront injustice without wielding more of it.
How to Respond To an Open Letter
How Chuck Klosterman New York Times ethicist responded to Kari, a mother of a child with Downs syndrome, after he used the word retarded in his writing.
When Your Childhood Friend Comes At You In Riot Gear
This is the moment the protestor recognized that the officer with the baton was his childhood friend.
True story. Long before Jacques Gourmelen took this photo on April 6, 1972 in Saint-Brieuc (France), the worker, Guy Burmieux, and the riot policeman, Jean-Yvon Antignac, had grown up together. The two had gone to high school together. Partied together. One article called them "best friends". Guy himself is quoted as calling them "inseparable."
The Middle Ground Ones
Unwilling to entrench myself on one side,
To soldier up around the poles,
To engage warfare as if every issue has two clean and neat sides with no space in between.
Unwilling to pledge my allegiance to any party's allegedly inerrant views about God, rather than trying to cast my allegiance farther, into the mysterious abyss beyond that where I might catch a glimpse of the inerrant God himself stirring in the waters.
Then Klansman Began Turning In Their Hoods to This Black Musician
n 1983, a member of the KKK listened as black musician Daryl Davis performed in an all-white lounge.That friendship led Davis to begin a lifelong quest to befriend KKK members and, as a result, collects the robes and hoods of Klansmen who choose to leave the organization because of their friendship with him.