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Showing posts from October 21, 2012

Our Lost Innocence

There is innocence in life that exists not simply within the confines of childhood. It is a spirit within all of us, an impelling urge for something that rings so true within us and within life, something exemplary and authentic, something that feels like goodness, something fragile and tender and loving that we long for it, often and sincerely, and sometimes desperately. The world can be hard and harsh with its obsessive competitiveness and its isolating values that pit people against one another.  This is done in politics and in religion, in school and in work, in neighborhoods and in suburbs everywhere. And what happens is we lose our innocence because we tell ourselves we have to fight to survive.  We have to slug it out and push our way through and not care.  We have to play games of cruel prejudice and of disengaging from those different from us, those not in our social status, those not of our faith, those of a race not our own. Our dislikes begin to dominate o