- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
"You're theologically positioned by privilege. How many "moments of beauty and kindness" are bequeathed to an African child born into hunger, disease, and war? You've seen the photos of the those swollen-bellied children with flies and scabs on their faces. Do you think that they "see and appreciate those moments of beauty and kindness when they appear"? They don't because they don't appear."
Your definition of beauty is pretty limited then to superficial definitions. In that "picture" you described of African children I see a greater beauty beyond "swollen-bellied children with flies and scabs on their faces." Think about it. These children who are in far worse conditions than you and I can even imagine, still choose to live another day, and have hope that maybe, just maybe life will get better. They could just as easily decide "yep, life for me will never get better than this, think I'll end it now." Yet I haven't heard of mass suicides happening there because of their chronic famine situation. They could sit still and do nothing. They don't. They try and play and do normal happy things that their counterparts in Western nations do, albeit at an energy level they can sustain due to their malnutrition. They may not appreciate beauty and kindness the way we see it sitting on our comfy couches in the West, but by getting up every day and going about their lives they certainly appreciate the beauty of life they were given, no matter how grim and tragic. That right there is beauty of the human spirit we can never even try and capture in our privileged societies in North America.
