A Child's Doll

"No empire justifies breaking a child's doll. No ideal is worth the sacrifice of a toy train."

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 454

I think these lines jumped out at me because of the Vermont Public Philosophy Week talk that I gave a couple weeks ago, but also because of the Trumpian horror story that we're living through. My talk focused on Thucydides, especially his Melian Dialogue and how power and empire negatively impacted the Athenians. Many Greeks at the time thought that the Athenian slaughter of the Melians cursed them, but Thucydides wasn't willing to go that far. However, he did make it clear that endless war and aggression and ambition would corrupt human nature. I keep watching these news reports which complain that Trump's unlawful war on Iran was driving up gas prices and how this aggravated people. Somehow, the price at the pump is more important than bombing a girls' school and killing over a hundred children. This is exactly what Thucydides was warning us against. I'm now sixty-six, and it seems like that for my entire life the US has been at war, almost universally punching down at weaker countries. It has so corrupted our soul that we can no longer feel, let alone realize that we have become the bad guys.