"If one person is comfortable, we all should be comfortable. But if one person isn't, we all shouldn't rest." As a prescription for society, this standard of comfort would be hard to universalize.
Williams elaborated: "We must always, always comfort the afflicted. But in order to get justice, we must afflict the comfortable."
"Sometimes our liberal, Jewish social justice worlds on the Upper West Side and for sure in Park Slope have a kind of comfort about them," Lander explained.
He explained "An ideal" that he had heard articulated, "From a Christian, rather than a Jew, of 'comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,' which I have made a core ideal of my social-justice activism." In a 2015 interview, Lander called the principle a "Deep, sometimes painful, but often joyous responsibility."
Following the meeting, Drinkwater tweeted "Comfort the afflicted; afflict the comfortable." When asked what she meant by this, she said that it was a quotation from the Bible's Book of James, and that it spoke to her sense of mission.
The original quotation, in which Mr. Dooley described the function of the newspaper: "Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward." Somehow, in a bizarre game of "Cultural telephone," this mock-sonorous fiddle-faddle has gathered the effulgence of holy writ for progressives, who take it as descriptive of their "Joyous responsibility."
Properly speaking, isn't it their job to make people more comfortable, not to diminish comfort? But on the other hand, it's frightening to consider that New York is now run by progressive militants who appear to believe that their vocation is to "Afflict" their constituents by disrupting their undeserved calm and comfort.
https://www.city-journal.org/nyc-progressive-leaders-policy-of-mass-immiseration
No comments:
Post a Comment