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The Privilege of the Oppressed
Better a cruel world than a cruel conscience.
There is a certain clarity of mind, an unobstructed impression of reality, that accompanies the turmoils of oppression. Though the oppressor may be granted every power, and the oppressed forced to experience all varieties of hardship and indignity, there is a certain embarrassment that must necessarily accompany the irreality of the oppressor, whose perverted picture of justice has deformed that sacred virtue into its opposite. All oppressors are themselves oppressed by fallacy.
The slave owners had to run from the truth of their hypocrisy; they had to futilely hide from the unavoidability of the error of their ways; and they had to endure each day the lash of their conscience. The endorsers of the patriarchy live with a crippling misconception belied by their every demonstration of incompetence. All those slum lords, slippery politicians, and callous businessmen that eagerly promote every sort of maltreatment of their fellow man, for the sake of their own greed, find that same greed works invariably to eat at their happiness for the sake of its own self-perpetuation.
There are no examples of such tongue-tying oxymorons as happily unjust, joyfully malevolent, or blissfully greedy. Congratulations to the oppressed who have only to suffer under the encumbrance of…
