误读：Don’t Give Up on...

昨天到今天被徐州丰县八孩女子最终调查通报相关的各类信息所淹没。

千头万绪，千言万语，最终决定用这样一种另类且安全的方式，记录下我此刻的心情，不为别人，只为自己。

 

对公平正义的追寻，对人生而为人的信仰，天真无用的理想主义者需要心中有光才能走下去。再无助再失望的时候也要走下去。

 

希望每个普通人，哪怕身处黑暗，也能心向光明。

 

【文稿】

What does it mean to love your country?

 

I have spent most of my life studying our country’s history and literature because of a deep if sometimes difficult affinity I would call love. Deeper, though, is a feeling like a love of family, a hope that whoever by whatever accident or choice falls under the definition of family will thrive and will experience even a difficult life as a blessing because his or her worth is a fact without conditions.

 

A family would take practical steps to ease one another through hard times and to preserve the integrity of home as a special refuge. The honor of a family would consist in a very generous acknowledgment of claims on its loyalty and care.

 

It is often said that country is an idea, stated definitively in early documents left to us by a coterie of men seemingly too compromised to have come up with such glorious language — as we would be, too, if we should happen to achieve anything comparable. Human beings are sacred, therefore equal. We are asked to see one another in the light of a singular inalienable worth that would make a family of us if we let it.

 

The ethic in these words should be the standard by which we judge ourselves, our social arrangements, our dealings with the vast family of humankind. It will always find us wanting. The idea is a progressive force, constantly and necessarily exposing our failures and showing us new paths forward.

 

For some time we have been dealing with an active rejection of this idea. As a woman who saw the world before the movements for civil rights and women’s rights, I know how potent the idea of equality can be. There are those who find it threatening, who are so fearful of dealing with other groups, or with women, on equal terms that they fantasize about violence toward them, treating whole categories of their own people as deadly enemies.

 

They have translated anger and disappointment into rage against people of other opinions, the elites, the poor, even people whose very existence cannot be proved.

 

As a liberal, I am loyal to this country in ways that make me a pragmatist. If someone is hungry, feed him. He will be thirsty, so be sure that he has good water to drink. If he is in prison, don’t abuse, abandon or exploit him, or assume that he ought to be there. If these problems afflict whole populations, those with influence or authority should repent and do better, as all the prophets tell them. 

 

At present we are told that this country is being made great, but specifics are hard to come by.

 

This country was, from the outset, a tremendous leap of faith. We tend not to ponder the brutality of the European world at the time our colonies formed and then fledged, so we have little or no idea of the radicalism not only of stating that “men,” as creatures of God, were equal, but of giving the idea profound political consequences by asserting for them unalienable rights, which were defined and elaborated in the Constitution. Our history to the present day is proof that people find justice hard to reach and to sustain. It is also proof that where justice is defined as equality, a thing never to be assumed, justice enlarges its own definition, pushing its margins in light of a better understanding of what equality should mean.

 

There is much to be done, more than inevitably limited people can see at a given moment. But the other side of our limitation is the fact that it carries with it a promise that we still might see a new birth of freedom, and another one beyond that. Social justice is the great instrument of human advancement. We have no right to fail it.

                                                                                               

                                                                            ——Marilynne Robinson