Welcome back to
the Liberty Insider.
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Before the break, I
was sharing something
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that I'd written in Liberty,
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the onset of the COVID emergency
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and our changed lifestyle.
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And in the few minutes left,
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I want to start off
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by sharing
something that I just wrote
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not yet published,
actually, for the...
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I guess it's the July issue.
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Another editorial
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and the first one
I'd called Contagion,
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which is the working
title of this program,
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but this one I
called the Masque.
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And I have to explain this
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as I did to my
children who asked me about it.
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We're all wearing masks now,
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by government edict and
by practical consideration,
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in spite of the fact
that early on in the pandemic,
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we were told they
made no difference,
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which I wondered at the time.
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But now we pretty
much have to wear them
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and I do it gladly.
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It's practical consideration.
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That's spelled mask.
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But the word that I
titled this is the Masque,
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M-A-S-Q-U-E.
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A masque was a...
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Well, I'll explain it
in little in the editorial
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but it was an event
where people wore masks,
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but it was a party
and a social convention
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where you are going
sort of semi anonymously,
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and you could maybe
get away with things
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that you wouldn't
normally and so the masque,
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the deception in other words.
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I wrote this, "Last
time I was in Venice
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the water stains
in St. Mark's Square
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were still visible,
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though months after
the last flooding tide.
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Some of the
steps onto the canals
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looked suspiciously slimy,
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but by and large
it was easy to forget
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the predicted Atlantean future.
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The most unavoidable reminder
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was one grand
and ancient building
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held up by a
complicated piling system
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and cocooned
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by an outer
frame of scaffolding,
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designed not to
give building access
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but to hold
things up and together.
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And in the narrow streets,
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people jostled and
moved in a crowded procession
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scarcely imaginable
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now in these days of
COVID-19 social distancing.
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Many of them wore masks,
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it seemed and
was a festival time,
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and the stores were
brimming with the artisanal
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and often expensive
masks for the masques:
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and those masques reminders
of medieval entertainments
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and vehicle for often profane
and politically dangerous talk
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behind the
painted grotesqueries.
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I cannot shake the
feeling of a surreal parallel
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to the Days of
COVID Abnormality.
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On the face of it,
this situation is big,
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but bigness aside, a
necessary mass quarantine,
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it seems to minimize infection.
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Intended or not,
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the whole experience
seems to have thrust us
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into the theater of the absurd
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and dangers way beyond
the flulike depredations.
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It should be obvious
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even to the most
amateur psychologist
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that social distancing
and the mandatory masks,
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now that they
have belatedly appeared
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even on supermarket
shelves, as has toilet paper,
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these masks have
changed our social psyche.
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It might not be so obvious,
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except to those who
muse on other places
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and other times,
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that this was ever
a necessary condition
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for crowd control
and state dominance
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of the individual.
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It is the ultimate antidote
to democracy and freedom.
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Some, in spite of
the stupefying magic
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of these moments
of disorientation,
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have spoken aloud about the ease
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with which individual
rights no longer matter so much,
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how religion,
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once dismissed as
the opiate of the masses
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by a hated
ideologue, hint Karl Marx,
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now takes a weirdly
confirming sleepy back seat
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to a simplistic
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either or
scenario of public safety.
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Yes, it is true
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that any religion
or other personal habit
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that places
others at risk of life
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and limb needs to be held back.
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But whether broad or
any, in most cases testing,
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the restriction of religion,
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even of the drive-by kind
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favored by elites and Pharisees,
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makes no sense to me.
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Essential services have at times
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seemed an oxymoron.
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We must,
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yes, well, why not,
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spare a little charity
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for the position
of community leaders
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faced with an unknown
horror and rapid contagion.
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But did they panic,
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or just react in a way
conditioned by a worldview?
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Three trillion, and counting,
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Weimar dollars have
been given away so far.
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A small fraction of that
could have paid for masks
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and rapid testing for all.
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Then pockets of
infection could have been known
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and those infected
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or directly in
contact quarantined,
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saving the greater freedoms
from their possible demise
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in the new Darwinian
Big Brother Solution.
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But that is
what might have been.
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Well, actually,
there are a few countries
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in the world
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that have taken
negative advantage
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to further restrict
civil and religious liberties
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as part of their
ongoing COVID agenda.
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We have not quite gone
that way here in the West
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and in the USA specifically yet.
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As I write these lines,
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several weeks
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before the cover
date of the magazine,
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and speak them to
you here in this program,
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there is rioting,
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demonstrations in
cities all across the nation.
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Not yet food riots
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from a 1929 Redux
financial pandemic:
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No!
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The proximate cause today
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is the shockingly public killing
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in Minneapolis of
George Floyd by a policeman
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kneeling on his neck
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and insensible to his
cries of "I can't breathe."
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But this is a play
whose curtain goes up
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with such regularity
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that it has become
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as characteristic of
American law enforcement
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as the usually
unarmed London Bobby
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is over there.
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And as shocking as many find
the president's guttural call
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for military law and order,
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it is of a piece with
the reverse engineering
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of social distancing.
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This issue of Liberty
has a special feature,
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the one I'm writing about
on Congressman John Lewis,
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a surviving memorial of
the civil rights movement.
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I am moved when I read
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his remembrance
of the day in 1965
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when he and Martin Luther
King and assorted idealists,
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who were not
content with "who we were, "
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linked arms and walked
into the swinging billy club,
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the whip, and the
released attack dogs.
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"We were ready to
die" is his remembrance.
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I wish we were not
getting the magazine ready
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and recording this program,
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as the dogs again
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are seen loosed on
demonstrators and horses
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wade into crowds
and even children
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and the elderly are
struck by riot police.
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I remember that
time all too well,
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as a teenager
recently arrived in the US
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from my birthplace of Australia.
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The background hiss
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was the noise of a
seemingly endless war
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in Vietnam.
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I remember my draft number,
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high enough that
with my grades in school
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it mattered little to me
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whether my draft board records
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had been burnt in riots or not.
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But I remember the
thousands of young men
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fleeing to Canada.
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I remember friends
coming back from Vietnam
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minus limbs
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and with what
post-Gulf War we now call PTSD.
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I also remember
friends in the white coats
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telling of guinea-pigging
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for who knows
what chemical horrors.
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Like now, it was a surreal time.
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The year 1968
comes to mind most.
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It was a
presidential election year.
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The Democratic Party held
its convention in Chicago,
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whose mayor
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in the most
nonpartisan way possible
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determined to keep law and order
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in spite of the provocateurs,
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draft dodgers, and
anarchists put them.
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A nation then was
shocked at how violently
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the Chicago
police dealt with them.
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That was the year
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presidential candidate
Bobby Kennedy was shot.
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He was a tough
understudy to his slain brother,
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and he probably
wasn't the liberal
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that his followers thought,
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but he was in a fine
line of slain public figures
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in a tough
political neighborhood.
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That was the year
Martin Luther King was slain.
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He was an activist
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who had already
transcended personhood:
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which is why his
death seemed to many
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the end of a dream for
a new and better world.
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Cities all over the country
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erupted in
violence and destruction.
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I still remember
Washington, D.C.,
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the nation's capital burning
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and tens of
thousands of national guardsmen
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and police vehicles
with tape on the windows
00:09:09.31\00:09:11.71
to neutralize
rocks from rioters.
00:09:11.75\00:09:14.22
And in the middle of
it all, the Tet Offensive,
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which showed that French folly
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and half a million
American college boys
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lacked the resolve of an
ever-strengthening enemy!
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But that was then.
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We and our
democracy survived, somehow.
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When I look back on it,
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I think it was
due to "high hopes,"
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and a rallying of people
of good spiritual inclination,
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and not immaterial to it
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all was the Jesus movement
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emerging from the mist of
the flower power movement.
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Or to put it in
more analytical terms:
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people renewed
the social contract.
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I hope that is the "again"
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that this administration
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and many in our day
think of and hope for.
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In 1968 social
conflict had not yet come
00:10:02.53\00:10:05.57
to the full social
distancing of 2020.
00:10:05.60\00:10:08.44
People were traumatized,
00:10:08.47\00:10:10.11
but not yet
socially or morally asleep.
00:10:10.14\00:10:12.34
Bobby Kennedy campaign
from the flatbed of a truck
00:10:12.37\00:10:14.78
in Indianapolis
00:10:14.81\00:10:16.14
rather than by
Zoom, Facebook or Twitter.
00:10:16.18\00:10:18.45
It fell to him to tell the crowd
00:10:18.48\00:10:20.02
that Martin Luther
King had just been murdered.
00:10:20.05\00:10:22.68
He quoted the
ancient Greek tragedian
00:10:22.72\00:10:26.45
Aeschylus to them.
00:10:26.49\00:10:28.16
This is what Aeschylus
wrote and Bobby Kennedy shared,
00:10:28.19\00:10:31.59
"Even in our sleep,
00:10:31.63\00:10:34.33
pain which cannot forget
00:10:34.36\00:10:36.13
falls drop by
drop upon the heart,
00:10:36.16\00:10:39.67
until in our own despair,
00:10:39.70\00:10:42.47
against our will,
00:10:42.50\00:10:44.11
comes wisdom
00:10:44.14\00:10:45.64
through the awful grace of God.
00:10:45.67\00:10:49.34
There was no
rioting in Minneapolis."
00:10:49.38\00:10:53.98
You might think
that I'm using hyperbole,
00:10:54.02\00:10:56.25
but I think I'm using analogy.
00:10:56.28\00:10:59.05
In some ways
we've been there before.
00:10:59.09\00:11:01.52
And in some ways
00:11:01.56\00:11:02.89
things are not
nearly as bad now.
00:11:02.92\00:11:04.76
But the underlying
dynamic is eerily familiar
00:11:04.79\00:11:08.53
with the added
complication of COVID
00:11:08.56\00:11:10.97
on an international scale,
00:11:11.00\00:11:13.10
and I believe as never before,
00:11:13.13\00:11:16.17
and whether in
the United States,
00:11:16.20\00:11:17.61
but particularly
in the United States,
00:11:17.64\00:11:19.11
we need to protect
freedom and religious freedom.
00:11:19.14\00:11:22.08