"Child, what is it that you seek?"
"The truth sir, the truth."
"The truth is in your heart."

Watched this documentary about the Holocaust. The filmmaker interviewed some Polish villagers who lived next to the concentration camps... they all claimed to have been ignorant of the mass murder that went on around them. But how could they ignore the billowing smoke and stench of burning flesh that inundated their homes day and night? If you witness a man being beaten to death and do not intervene, does that not make you complicit in the act? What if the murderer was a friend, a neighbour, or a brother, and he had good cause to hate that man? Would you turn him in, or sympathise and shelter him? Moral dilemmas. In our comfortable first-world countries, we often forget the violence that punctuates human history. Would I have dared stand up to the Nazis? Would I have joined the underground resistance or just turned a blind eye? I think my principles would have driven me to take up arms. But what if the people being persecuted had wronged me in the past? Would I still have this moral conviction?

She holds the hand that holds her down

If you witness incest, and say nothing, are you not condoning the rape, encouraging the rapist? Sure, incest is not a black and white issue, the line between rape and consensual sex is sometimes blurred. But even if you commit incest out of love, does that truly absolve the relationship of its social stigma? Why do these stigmas exist? Is it purely because of increased likelihood of genetic mutations? Or because they threaten the moral foundations of the family, and community, the institutions which give meaning to our lives?

Incest deprives the child of a childhood seperate from adulthood, of parental guidance and love distinct from the selfishness of sexual lust, and vice versa. Hence girls who experience incest as a child are more likely to slip into dependent relationships, and become prostitutes, pornstars, drug abusers, beaten wives and the like.

It's sad that the children are unaware that the behavioural patterns they accept out of love, will alter their lives in incomprehensible ways, endangering the possibility of experiencing untainted love later in life - the altruistic love of equals, without submission, confusion, self-loathing or heartbreak. Yes, the child is not always an innocent. But even the Lolitas of the world deserve a glimpse of life's many possibilities... a rich delta of fertile valleys and tributaries stretching out to a mysterious, cloud-swept horizon... a view of alternate futures that they are deprived of, held back by the arms of inappropriate lovers.