Limits of sympathy

I was at Boston College Law School's commencement on Friday and was amazed to hear speaker after speaker refer to these "uncertain times."  Wow, I thought, I would never have guessed these lawyers would be both so liberal and so insightful that they would see the impact of the Great Recession on the people at large.  Or maybe it's the parlous state of American democracy and civil society that they see.  Either way...

Then it struck me.  They were worrying about lawyers, about their fellow guild members, not about the population at large.  Times are uncertain for the employment of lawyers, especially newly minted juris doctors.

What would it take for all Americans to see the peril that now exists to our society in stark and persistent income  inequality, in the power equality that permits the wealthy to buy elections, in the waste of human lives in favor of corporate unaccountability, in the vicious vituperation from wingnuts that is the new normal?  How many people have to suffer for the rest of us to understand?