After a local county supervisor tore me about today for questioning her taking down some basketball rims in a country park, since she was blaming the young men and women who play basketball for neighborhood problems, I am starting to wonder if speaking my conscience is worth the trouble. But I know that I cannot stop. For as Dorothy Day and Gandhi said: “My understanding of the teaching of the Church is that we must follow our conscience, even an erroneous conscience. My reading of Cardinal Newman confirms that. I think it is in Boyer’s life of Newman that he quotes Newman as saying he drank a toast to conscience first, the Pope second.” (Dorothy Day in the Catholic Agitator 1, no, 9, Dec. 1970).
If I am wrong about the need to speak out about the immorality of teaching war at a Catholic Jesuit University, the inconsistency of the same university hosting the military and Catholic worker archives, the injustice of blaming basketball players for the woes of county residents around the park, why do not people tell me why I am wrong and how my conscience is ill informed, rather than attacking me personally? I guess attacking the messenger, which in my case is easy because of my faults, is an easy way to ignore the message.
Today I brought some of the worms from the Worm Condo into the house in the GP Home Box in the sun room. A friend from Madison who had used my driveway to park to attend the baseball game asked me what I do for my worms. I said, not much, just feed them and make sure they have water and the right conditions. I told him the worms were ‘working worms’. All they do is eat, digest, poop and procreate.
Worms have the simplest and smallest of brains. They are not bothered by name-calling or what people think of them. They just do what they were created for. I guess just being is being a worm of a man.
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