Thursday, March 24, 2011

John Stewart on Romero


How Oscar Romero Got Disappeared By Right-Wingers A Second Time

I'm a big John Stewart fan. Besides being funny, I also think he really "gets it" - and underneath all the laughs, he often offers some very serious insights. This clip (click on the link above)  from one year ago, is one of them, and it's worth another look.

All week long I've been thinking about Oscar Romero and the people of El Salvador and the sad history of the death squads. I've been pondering the observation made by Fr. Ignatio EllacurĂ­a, S.J, that "the struggle against injustice and the pursuit of truth cannot be separated nor can one work for one independent of the other." We must tell the truth: and the truth includes our own government's complicity with the evil that unfolded in El Salvador in the 1980s. Revisionist history, and worse still denying history, is the worst kind of lying.

The problem with Texas deciding who is important enough to make it into our textbooks is that they buy a lot of them, so their (ill-informed) decisions ripple out to smaller states. I don't know what to do about that, except to make sure that the people I know and serve learn exactly who Oscar Romero was, and give thanks for his life and witness, and then teach their children and children's children about him...

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