In an act of lunacy, I stayed late at work today and decided to download one weekend's worth of articles from CounterPunch. This is a leftwing news compendium that irritates me to no end by not having printer-friendly versions of their stories available. Instead, there is an infuriatingly long left column that lists every link for a month plus various books and articles of value. I've taken to guesstimating the length of any particular article and outputting 10-12 pages in hopes of getting an entire story to print.

As an experiment, I cut and pasted every article from the past weekend and today into one text document. I ended up with 47 pages of 9 point type. I managed to get through 2/3 of it before giving up because, alas, I will have to sleep sometime tonight!

Despite the fact that it is simply impossible to read all this valuable information, it was astonishing how much I learned in three hours of concentrated reading. I fnished up with this remarkable post about Auschwitz and the political message this place plays in our lives today. Just open your mind and read it. Forget the myths and look at the reality:

when the image of evil is brewed within your cultural heritage as the discourse of the other, you may as well become blind to the fact that you yourself are already evil.

One thing I learned from being up close and personal to a noxious form of evil as I was growing up is that I can never assume that evil is something out there and foreign to me. It is a choice we make on a daily basis. Let us have the strength to choose good over evil today.