Just read a very enlightened blog. I am always grateful when I can read what I struggle to say. I have even had a hard time explaining to some in our own community why it is important to make a contribution. or explaining why diversity, not just blending of gay and straight, but real diversity, is so important. I wish that more would do something. Perhaps then the few of us that do, the usual suspects as I think of them, would not get so burned out.
I remember my friend Howard once asked me why I thought it was that so few do as much as we do for a community that would otherwise seem indifferent to our efforts. Guilt was my first thought, but I know it must be something larger. If I ever figure that out, look out.
"In order to increase the abiding satisfaction for the mass of our people and all people, someone must sacrifice something of his own happiness. It is silly to tell intelligent human beings “be good and you will be happy.” The truth is today - be good, be decent, be honorable and self-sacrificing and you will not always be happy. You will often be desperately unhappy. You may even be crucified, dead and buried and the third day you will be just as dead as the first. But with the death of your happiness may easily come increased happiness and satisfaction and fulfillment for other people, strangers, unborn babes, uncreated worlds. If this is not sufficient incentive never try it, remain hogs…”
Commencement address to Howard University, 1930 - W. E. B. Du Bois (first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard)
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It's like the paradox of paradoxes only with occasional lucidity.
