Beautiful little story here about the human capacity for altruism and self-sacrifice. I’m still wiping away the tears.
UPDATE: Sometimes people take something and run with it. Just see what Kathryn did with this one little link.
Filed under: Uplifting stories |
Bookworm Room (ARCHIVES) 
I found something relevant to that court decision but I’m not going to spend the time to find the post to comment there. So.
Legalistic Life
Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.
I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.
And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.
This is of course an extract of the speech, that neo posted about.
http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com/2006/08/what-do-you-get-when-you-cross.html
The speech talks much about the decadence of the West, decades before today.
God bless those families!
That is a beautiful story. And in an odd way, I’m glad it raised a lump in your throat– that reaction says good things about you, too.