Re-Engaging the Political Debate

I’ve not been posting much political content for the past months for a few reasons. First, the issue most central to the global debate is uniquely ill-suited to social media. In October, the day after Hamas murdered over 1000 Israelis, I hazarded this excerpt from the poem September 1, 1939, by W.H. Auden:

“I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.”

Like Auden’s complete poem, written just hours after Hitler invaded Poland, setting the stage for World War II, I offered that stanza as a lament for the hell that would flow from that newly minted and atrocious history of violent action.

It was not taken as such.