Monday Morning Quote
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Monday Morning Quotes
Monday Morning Quotes
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Since 1998 I've been sending out these reflections first thing each
week--one or more quotes plus my thoughts about the intersections and
contradictions. They're archived here back to 2002, and a new one is
posted every Monday morning. Dialogue is still welcome . . .
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Quote #1239 - #IntheLight
25 May, 2026
IN THE LIGHT
"People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in places where everything is kept in the dark."
Tom Stoppard
NIGHT AND DAY
People can be horrible
when their behavior is unseen.
True in macrocosm
and microcosm.
Why I'm not much for privacy.
Privacy, too often a license
to do terrible things
to ourselves
and others.
When the light is on,
when doors are open,
behavior shifts dramatically.
That is something I am thinking about
on Memorial Day.
How do we
(as individuals and as a nation)
want to know and experience
ourselves?
How do we want to be known and experienced
by others?
By what thoughts and deeds and actions
do we want to be remembered?
And are we capable of living
the way we wish to be known?
In the light?
In the dark?
Aye, there's the rub.
Integrity.
The degree of distance between how we wish
to see ourselves
and how we are.
The only hope for integrity
is not only the effort expended
to live up to our word,
but the willingness to own how and where we have not,
and to hold ourselves accountable
for the consequences of that.
America?
I can't even.
Different in light and dark,
but
even in the light
the hypocrisy,
the fear-mongering,
the lack of accountability
abounds.
But today is Memorial Day.
So today I mourn for the just-barely-adults
(mostly boys, mostly lower classes)
who have died and continue to die
every day all over this Earth
fighting wars that for the most part
were not their own.
And, too, those who have died
fighting injustice throughout history,
and, now, struggling against
this shameless underhanded undertaking,
this crack at kakistocracy.
I mourn for the families
who have had to go on without them.
And I weep that people go on
doing terrible things to each other
generation after generation,
privately and publicly,
in the dark and in the light,
and that we have to be taught the same lessons
over and over and over again.
And still we do not learn.
Shellen Lubin
May 25, 2026
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