While reading: Benedictine Options: Learning to Live from the Sons and Daughters of Saints Benedict and Scholastica by Patrick Henry, I came across the below.
We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. . . .
We have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. . . . Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all. If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts. - President Václav Havel’s New Year’s Day 1990 speech to the Czechoslovak people,
In the fractured and contentious times we find ourselves in, I was struck just how relevant this is. Following one of the most polarizing election cycles in modern history of United States, should we not take to heart what President Václav Havel calls his people to: an era of moral seriousness. We must put behind us our desire to lay blame and forge a path of cooperation, unity, and responsibility for the betterment of our community.