Maurice Ward 🇵🇸

Palestinian journalist Alaa Hamouda met a displaced girl who had reportedly been carrying her injured sister on her shoulders for more than two kilometres barefoot. After meeting them, Hamouda helped them get to Al-Bureij refugee camp.

Immigration policy is about how many people a country admits, from where and on what terms. Within those bounds, reasonable people can disagree. When people frame their opposition to immigration on the basis of contempt for other human beings based on national origin, that is at best serious error and at worst something much more revolting. It is a disgusting thing to look down upon whole peoples as lesser beings, unworthy of regard in the light of universal human dignity. So while I will debate immigration, I will not debate any stance that rests upon disdain for peoples as such cannot be reconciled with a right understanding of the worth of the human person.

When I was teaching at a high school in Alaska, we read Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground" together. Paragraph by paragraph. We spent six weeks on that one story. Here's what paragraph-by-paragraph close reading actually looks like: I'd read a passage aloud. Then I'd ask, "What is the Underground Man really saying here?" Silence at first. Then someone would venture an interpretation. Someone else would push back. Within ten minutes, they'd be arguing about human nature, about pride and spite and self-deception. People hear this and assume I was working with exceptional kids. I wasn't. I was working with kids who had never been asked to grapple with genuinely profound ideas before. In my experience, when you treat young people as capable of serious intellectual work, and take the time to train them how to read difficult texts, they learn how to do so.