Purpose

Our job is to love people.  When it hurts.  When its awkward.  When its uncool and embarrassing.  Our job is to stand together, to carry the burdens of one another and to meet each other in our questions.
- TWLOHA

Flags and Helpers

"In the videos from the marathon bombings, you see all these flags lined up together, none higher than any other. Those 96 flags, representing the nations of the people running the Boston Marathon, are side by side because they stand for a larger "us," an "us" sharing a human endeavor that doesn't require a "them."

"I'm cool with living in a world with flags, but I am most proud to live in a world that can hold events where no flag flies above any other. There are people who don't want to live in that world, Hank, but I know that we are not going to give it up. And I know that we can always hope and look to the helpers and endeavor to be among them."

For Boston

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity." 

But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths. 

But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in a while, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stand against the darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil-doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago. 

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will." 

-Patton Oswalt

Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell. 

Spirituality is for those who have already been there. 

 -Vine Deloria

We ourselves will be remembered as a collective, for what we did and failed to do together. 

-John Green

Fire & Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. 

-Robert Frost

Drew Dudley: Leading with Lollipops

What does it mean to be a leader?  Drew Dudley tells us in under six and a half minutes.

We've made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world.  There's only 6 billion understandings of it.  And if you change one person's understanding of it, one person's understanding of what they're capable of, one person's understanding of how much people care about them, one person's understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world, you've changed the whole thing.  Its a simple idea, but I don't think its a small one.

Telling Stories About the Stories We Tell

The following interview with Philip Gourveitch, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, originally appeared in the Boston Review.  In it, Gourevitch discusses "the challenges of writing about the history we are in the midst of making, the burdens of memory and the appeal of forgetting, the dangers of narrative simplification, the limits of humanitarianism, and the messiness of politics."

Cécile Alduy: In your writing, you always find a balance between bringing in the long history to understand the way things develop over time and the very detailed hour-to-hour reporting on how it happened. How is your job different from that of an historian?

Philip Gourevitch: Above all, I suppose, to be a good historian you don’t necessarily have to be a good storyteller. You can be a good historian by virtue of making a contribution to the field without making a direct contribution to literature or public understanding. What historians, or anthropologists, or political scientists are interested in can overlap considerably with my interests, but the methodology, discipline, and long-term purpose are really different. I mean, I’m first and last a writer. If I weren’t writing about Rwanda right now, I’d be writing about something else entirely; and if I weren’t writing reportage, I would be writing fiction or plays. That’s not true of most historians who are going to write about Rwanda. They’re going to be coming at it as Rwandanologists. They’re going to be Africanists. They’re going to be Genocide Studies people. They’re going to be legal scholars or professors of postcolonial studies. And their frame of reference will be largely prescribed by that academic discipline—which is, I guess, as it should be.

Another big difference is that as a writer-reporter I’m not so concerned with making explicit reference to the existing literature, the way academic writers are. I’m much more interested in what I see and what I hear directly; I work in a documentary vein. For instance in recent conversations about current affairs with senior government officials in Rwanda I started to notice that a number of them, completely unprompted, began making references to late-nineteenth century events in Rwanda. That’s the time when Rwanda, which had been a proudly isolated country, was colonized, and lost its self-determination as a state. So I started mentioning this to the people I was interviewing, “You know, it’s funny that you are all bringing up that same period.” And they all expressed complete surprise. “Really, who else?” Then I would maybe mention someone, and they’d all say, “Really? He was talking about this?” So, I thought, that’s interesting, there’s this common reference that each person thinks is his own, and which each uses to make different points. And then I thought, well, is this history they are talking about reliable? Are these stories they’re telling me correct?

Grown Strong with Love

In those days, we finally chose to walk like giants and hold the world in arms grown strong with love; and there may be many things we forget in the days to come, but this will not be one of them.

-Brian Andreas

"Dr. Mukwege Fights Back"

This article by Dr. Denis Mukwege, Medical Director of the Panzi Hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo, originally appeared in On the Ground.

For the past 16 years at the Panzi Hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo, my staff and I have been treating women who have been victimized by sexual violence, which has been systematically used as a weapon of war in the armed conflict that has ravaged our country.  Rape is one of the most deadly weapons of war, destroying families and communities and future generations, as well as the women brutally targeted.  Last year I had some hope that the situation was improving, but since the beginning of this year the security situation has again deteriorated and victims of sexual violence have started coming to the hospital again in great numbers.