Art & Argentina stories give me hope

Sometimes, I find hope in odd places, like the "international" of yesterday's New York Times.

On page one, there was a story about the hundreds of paintings that were stolen by Nazis and finally recovered decades later.

Inside, there was a story about records relating to Argentina's "Dirty War." Government officials have found a "trove of secret documents" that "provide rare insight" into "human rights abuses" that took place under Argentina's dictatorship from 1976 - 1983.

Given the extent of the harm and wrongdoing in both cases, it would be easy to read them and feel depressed about how often and how severely authority figures abuse their authority.

But somehow, my "take away" is more hopeful. Both stories reminded me of Martin Luther King quotes:

"No lie lives forever."

"The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice."

Both stories remind me that while evil often wins in the short term, good often prevails in the long term.

Church officials continue to win skirmishes. They get child sex abuse cases tossed out on technicalities. They deceive citizens and congregants, calling heinous child sex crimes "boundary issues" and "suspected misdeeds." They persuade themselves and their hand-picked lay panels that abuse isn't really abuse. They "explain away" their deliberate complicity, calling it "missteps" and "errors." They keep sex offenders on the job, claiming that the "restrictions" they allegedly put on cunning criminals can somehow stop them from acting on their deeply-rooted and overwhelming compulsion to sexually violate others.

But with every passing day, it becomes harder for them to hide the truth and get by with it. 


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