What Matters: Justice

My most rewarding work has been for a series of seemingly lost causes: mental patients’ rights; destigmatizing AIDS; health care for poor people in remote parts of Bolivia. That’s fine with me. I want to keep it that way,

I want fewer digressions (serving beer to patrons of Williams’ Pub; editing manuscripts for tenured university professors; spending time in comfortably tedious meetings.) I want to rededicate myself, as Rob Eller-Isaacs once said "to the lost causes worthy of our lives."

TS Eliot wrote:
...For most of us, this the the aim
Never here to be realized;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying...”

I want to keep that aim in mind—not the victory of achieving justice, because it will not be fully achieved in my lifetime or anyone else’s—but simply the “lost cause” of trying.