Unless and until we have a change of heart, we should stop complaining. And come the first of the month, we should pay the bribe. To do less is to compound the tragedy; to do more—well, that road is the one never taken because we are moral pretenders to a war on poverty. We have been pretenders for three decades now, ever since the Vietnam War swallowed whole the ideals of the Great Society. To do more than tender the bribe would require empathy, charity, and connectedness, and in thirty years we have summoned up nothing close. Empathy demands that we recognize ourselves in the faces at Mount
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