By Peter Wingate
I don’t know about you, but my smug nature lets me believe that, when faced with a dire moral dilemma, I would always act on the side of good. I’d be the one ushering-in Anne Frank and her family to their new hidden home, away from those blatantly evil Nazis, or championing the release of Mandela amongst my unenlightened South African compatriots. Wouldn’t you?
Hindsight of course is black and white; it offers 20:20 vision and forgets the nuance and complexity of our existence. I have about as much idea of how I would react to the above scenarios as I have actual experience of the scenarios themselves – zilch.
My smugness is unfounded, granted, but surely I’d know to stand up and be counted against moral injustice should it happen right now…
The thing is, injustice continues to be rife in our society…
Respected social commentators (think fact and truth rather than fake-news, and alt-truth) suggest that the ‘leader of the free-world’ may usher in first-hand experience of American-made fascism (or is doing so as we speak). Fascism may make the trains run on time, but it tends to come hand-in-hand with social injustice and is no fan of good ol’ U S of A freedom.
The interesting question for me is: Where does the line get drawn? When does a contemporary political regime that not only disdains social injustice but gains populist traction from it (think the Mexican border wall etc.) require us to stand-up to it?
It reminds me of the urban legend of the frog put into a pan of tepid water. The water is ever so slowly brought to the boil, the frog oblivious to the change in temperature because the change is so gradual.
With no great contrast in heat it can’t distinguish that it is, in fact, boiling to death.
The thousand shades of grey of our contemporary lives rarely jump from white to black and can obscure a call to justice. This is our challenge today.
