The Worst of Our Country—And the Best
The Pittsburgh gunman embodied the cruelty that has sometimes stained the United States—but the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which he reviled, has long represented America at its most compassionate.
Every society contains its monsters: people damaged or disturbed enough, or misdirected enough, to inflict cruelty on others. A central purpose of society—its families, its schools, its civic and faith organizations, its official and unofficial political leadership—is precisely to encourage the good, and buffer and limit the bad, in what is always the wide range of human possibility.
Thus the harshest condemnation of leaders and organizations is for those who do the reverse: revving up and cheering on the worst in human instincts, which often come out as abuse of the weak and the other.
Of the weak: adults
