We hide our sad face behind a mask.
For it is truly sad. The most mournful thing you have ever seen. It's a face no one wants to look at or think about. A face that should be supple and robust, but instead is pallid and clammy, drawn with famine and burning with fever.
So we put on a mask, a sadface mask.
It has the sad look, but it's also festive, isn't it? It says: "I'm sad but I sure like a good time." The sadface mask may make you smile in spite. Or not.
Even so, even if you don't smile, the frown only droops so low. And the eyes are dead. The sadface mask is a thing. Undeserving of sympathy, and unworthy of your attention. Just look the other way and go cash your paycheck. Nothing to see on that side of the tracks.
Best to just focus on your work there Jack.
Some have come to love the thing. They'd do anything to avoid the barest glimpse of the rot that lies behind it, lest they think about what is happening to their face. Focus. Besides, to be confronted with the sickly sight in the mirror every morning just will not do. Won't do at all. So the very existence of their own truly sad face is forgotten to them.
Put on the best face you can, and push through it.
The sadface mask is ready-made for pushing through it.
But it tells lies with its well-polished expression. It hides a terrible sickness, that no one wants to see or talk about, that people are unwilling to even think about. Not an actor on stage, or a mild mid-morning melancholy, but a mortal, wasting plague of body and mind.
The worst part is: Taking the mask off could kill us. Many people are in thrall to it, and they go in fear of a world without it. There is a very large contingent of humanity who will fight like mad to keep it firmly in place.
It's as though the ghastly thing was applied using some equally awful adhesive.
But it must come off, and the disease behind it exposed at last. It will most certainly kill us if we continue to ignore it. Which is what the mask is for, of course.
Our face is sad, but we can change that. We must.
For so long as any one of us goes hungry, or is sick, or is abused, or oppressed, it's as though it were happening to all of us. We are a social species. And a moral one.
What does that mean to me? It means that none of us are alone. It means that the least of us deserves the same regard as the greatest. It means that love is love is love and it cannot be stopped or restricted. It means that the world and its people are worth saving and protecting. It means that every one of us is to be respected.
Every. Last. Person.
We have too long ignored these things, and our neighbors. We have ignored them and hidden the fact that we ignore them.
We must stop if we are to save ourselves.
That's why I'm a Democrat.