Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“As writers, what we do is remember. And to remember this world is to create it. The writer’s responsibility (whatever her or his time) is to change the world—improve his/her own time. Or, less ambitious, to help make sense of it..”

“There are... immediate perils (global stability, poverty, hunger, love, death), so it really is not a good time to write. To which observation one can only say: So what? When has it ever been a good time? Plague-ridden Britain for Chaucer? World War II for Eudora Welty? World War I for Virginia Woolf? South African brutality for Nadine Gordimer? The 94 percent slave population for Plato?”

“The mind really is a palace. Not only for its perception of symmetry and the outrageously beautiful, but also because it can invent, imagine, and, most important, it can delve.”

“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. -James Baldwin”

“I like to think that John Gardner’s view will hold: that language—informed, shaped, reasoned—will become the hand that stays crisis and gives creative, constructive conflict air to breathe, startling our lives and rippling our intellect. I know that democracy is worth fighting for. I know that fascism is not. To win the former intelligent struggle is needed. To win the latter nothing is required. ”

“Kant disregarded a perceptive observation by a black man by saying, "This fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid." Yet no slave society in the history of the world wrote more—or more thoughtfully—about its own enslavement.”

“Yours was the courage to live life in and from its belly as well as beyond its edges. To see and say what it was; to recognize and identify evil but never fear or stand in awe of it. It is a courage that came from a ruthless intelligence married to a pity so profound it could convince anyone who cared to know that those who despised us "need the moral authority of their former slaves..."”

“The courage of one who could go as a stranger in the village and transform the distances between people into intimacy with the whole world; courage to understand that experience in ways that made it a personal revelation for each of us.”

No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You
made American English honest—genuinely international. You exposed its
secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern, dialogic, representative,
humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and
evasion and hypocrisy.

“Jimmy [Baldwin], there is too much to think about you, and much too much to feel. The difficulty is your life refuses summation—it always did—and invites contemplation instead. Like many of us left here, I thought I knew you. Now I discover that, in your company, it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: you gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish.”

“But in the last two pages of The Bluest Eye, is, in essence, what I believe to be the dangers when one assumes that you can substitute license for freedom, when one assumes that you can use another’s deficiency for one’s own generosity, when one assumes that you can use another person’s misery and nightmares in order to clarify your own dreams.”

“Because it is relatively easy to recognize values in isolation. The problem gets complicated when those values are in conflict with other values. For then you have to figure out how to protect the very best of the group sensibilities; how to protect the noblest impulses. What are the nurturing structures worth keeping in the community?”

“When restorative justice processes happen in the context of conventional criminal justice systems—when participating becomes a means of avoiding prison...there is the risk, as the law professor Greenwood notes, "that mediation will become, or be perceived as, a ritualistic ratification of imposed solutions. Ritualized condemnation, apology, forgiveness, and catharsis always threatens to become an empty masquerade."”

“Many mediators will not mediate if a case involves abuse, and for good reason. Abuse cases have, at their core, a power dynamic that is so deep, so problematic, that mediation can re-victimize the victim. Mediation assumes that both parties have approximately equal power, and that's simply not always the case. Restorative justice is not mediation, but it too requires a safe playing field.”

“Significant research across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada also indicates that [restorative justice] reduces recidivism rates by 44 percent and helps break cycles of violence. Its impact is real.”

“As the Cree sociologist John Hansen writes, the elders in his community regard "the harm of one [as] the harm of all" and seek an accountability process that helps the offender better understand what they have done and work toward healing for not only victim and perpetrator, but for the community as well.”

“We cannot change the past, yet we can change the future, but only if we are honest about what has been and who was harmed, and who caused that harm.”

“Waziyatawin suggests, "Truth-telling has the potential to alleviate the burden that all of us carry-Dakota people who carry historical trauma and the pain of ongoing oppression and white Minnesotans who carry the burden of maintaining oppressive systems... Truth-telling allows us to relieve those burdens and take the next step towards justice." ”

“The genocide and displacement of Native Americans is one of the two great founding sins of the United States. The other, of course, is the enslavement of peoples of African descent—and, as with the treatment of Indigenous peoples, that history of oppression continues today in a myriad of ways.”

“The Talmud requires that a person confessing says the words, "We have sinned." But Maimonides' formulation of the ritual confession—as he codified it in his Day of Atonement liturgy—reads not merely "We have sinned," but rather "We and our ancestors have sinned" ”

“If we remember that [disabled] persons were put to death in the Third Reich, we will see care of people with [mental illness] as our own responsibility. If we remember how people persecuted on grounds of race, religion and politics and threatened with certain death often stood before the closed borders with other countries, we shall not close the door… on those who are… persecuted and seek protection with us.”

“All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected… and liable for it. The young and old generations must… help each other to… keep alive the memories. It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or made undone. However, anyone who… refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection…”

“My puzzlement used to be why is the Lone Ranger called "lone" if he is always with Tonto? Now, I see that given the racial and metaphorical nature of the relationship, he is able to be understood as "alone" precisely because of Tonto. Without him he would be, I suppose, simply "Ranger." ”

“One notes that to identify someone as a South African is to say very little; we need the adjective "white" South African or "black" South African. In the States it is quite the opposite: "American" means white, and Africanistic peoples struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with hyphens and ethnicity.”

“von Weizsäcker … in 1985…refuted the notion that Germans were unaware of the genocide as it took place: "Who could remain unsuspecting after the burning of the synagogues, the plundering, the stigmatization with the Star of David, the deprivation of rights, the ceaseless violation of human dignity? Whoever opened his eyes and ears and sought information could not fail to notice that Jews were being deported." ”

“the dominant public attitude for many years after the war was the sense that most Germans were victims duped by a small gang of ideologues, sent off to fight, and bombed by Allies, all in ignorance of what was really happening. In 1949, a poll revealed that half the population regarded Nazism as "a good idea, badly carried out." ”

“Our obligation to the truth changes when the person or people harmed are unable to stand as witness themselves, unable to hold for themselves the story of what really happened.

That which is owed belongs to the heirs. If the heirs are unknown, then that which is owed sits in public trust-but it no longer belongs to the perpetrator.

Our obligation to repentance outlives those to whom we are obligated.”

“Confession, in public. In Judaism, a gathering of ten people is considered a quorum, a critical mass that marks a context as communal.”

“The SS established a mental institution in the East for men suffering the effects of murdering women and children by November 1941. Helmut James von Moltke met a nurse who worked in this hospital. After the war, Bach-Zelewski... explained to his American interrogators that ‘(the) death camp was something that the Russians could not accomplish: it reflected the German gift for organization. Bureaucrats created it.’ ”

“The Nazis largely abandoned their previous method of extermination, shooting, because of the psychological effect they were having on the killers. SS Obergruppenfuehrer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski told Himmler that: ‘These men were now finished for the rest of their lives: they would either be neurotics or savages….’ ”