Several great religious teachers have taught us to love our neighbor, or to have compassion for all, or to seek political change by radically peaceful and loving actions. Many have been met with derision and violence, and our topic in the Truth Brigade, disinformation. We meet that, to begin with, by finding common ground in a George Lakoff Truth Sandwich.
Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address gives us our text today.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.[7]
Atheists and Buddhists and Jains and Daoists may substitute
...with firmness in the right as the light of Nature gives us to see the right (Discuss)
Now, we are not talking about being so open-minded that your brains fall out. We will still call a spade a damned shovel when necessary. But we won’t hate the shovel.
The work is not finished, nor the nation’s wounds bound up, nor many who have since borne the battle cared for. Nor have we achieved that just and lasting peace, nor do enough of us cherish that or any other of these ideals set out so long ago. But we are progressing.
Gandhi said it best.
First they ignore you. [the Antebellum South]
Then they laugh at you. [calling Lincoln a gorilla]
Then they fight you. [Yes, desperately, for years.]
Then you win. [The war, but not necessarily the peace.]
And then I add
Then they claim that it was their idea all along.