Visitors may find that this article on our present victim-hood culture makes useful distinctions between dignity, honour, and victim-hood that help us understand our present confusions.
None of these confusions would exist, of course, in a world of real crisis. Which is only to say that the concept of “a crisis,” whether personal or global, is itself always relative to the next worst possibility. Recall the man who fretted that he had no shoes, until he saw a man who had no feet.
I just finished reading a short, harrowing account by an English sailor who was on a ship that entered a bay populated by Nootka Indians on the Northwest coast of Canada in the early 1800s.
Dues to some earlier grievance against the Whiteman, the Chief ordered the immediate slaughter and beheading of the entire crew except for this fellow and his buddy, whom as blacksmiths, the Chief thought might be useful to the tribe for making metal weapons. Within an hour of his arrival, our sailor saw the severed and bloodied heads of his fellows – all 35 of them – lined up in a row on the deck of his ship.
Now that is a crisis!
At any rate, if we must arrange our thoughts surrounding our present petty grievances about each other, this article is helpful.
