As we despair, rage or re-gird I found inspiration in these words form Mountains beyond Mountains, and book by Tracy Kidder about Paul Farmer. Paul has spent his life fighting for healthcare for the poor from Haiti to the gulags of Russia.
Paul says
... How about if I say, I have fought for my whole life a long defeat. How about that? How about if I said, "That’s all it adds up to is defeat? A long defeat."
I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. . . . You know, people from our background - like you, like me - we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in [Partners in Health] is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat
Not a lot of analysis here, just a reminder siding with the losers (in his case the sick poor of the world) is a higher calling than winning. Even if it means unrelenting defeat. In our case the losers we must side with are the soldiers and civilians, the killers and killed in Iraq – condemned to their hellish existence because they have no political power.