Friday Sunset | Christy Hardin Smith

Jefferson Memorial at sunset via Camera Slayer.

This evening’s quote is a gem from Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to James Madison regarding the inevitable failure of injustice:

No nation however powerful, any more than an individual, can be unjust with impunity. Sooner or later, public opinion, an instrument merely moral in the beginning, will find occasion physically to inflict its sentences on the unjust… The lesson is useful to the weak as well as the strong.

Democracy has never been easy. It requires full-throated and educated participation to make it work.

Far too often, we forget that it is our active voice, our actions, and our constancy in demand for a "more perfect union" that are the grist for the national mill. The key is to continually renew a commitment of the public to greater justice and work for the common good while playing the individual baser instincts against one another to wear them out of the national fabric.

Not an easy task, by any stretch, is it?

What say you?

nahant | Friday May 15, 2009 03:26 pm 1

Hmmm

nahant | Friday May 15, 2009 03:32 pm 2

You ask the eternal questions??
Why
Why
Why cant we all just learn to get along?
Why do we fear some one DIFFERENT??
Why is that religion for all it’s good intentions can still be used to take anther’s life??
Just a few of the many questions of WHY CAN”T we….

oregondave | Friday May 15, 2009 05:25 pm 3

The key is to continually renew a commitment of the public to greater justice and work for the common good while playing the individual baser instincts against one another to wear them out of the national fabric.

” . . . playing the individual baser instincts against one another to wear them out of the national fabric.”

That is an interesting concept, worth more discussion. Not an easy task, agreed, but how is it done? What energies devoted to that pursuit might be better used in pursuing greater justice and nurturing our better nature? At the roots of all the noise, the sturm und drang, lie the basic human needs we all share. What about a discourse that digs deeply into those; that transforms words and actions — swords into plowshares?