I was talking to my doctor today (I’m fine, thank you–a routine visit), and he happened to ask whether I had ever fainted. I told him that I had–twice, as a matter of fact, at about age 9 and age 12. The first time, the teacher was explaining about an addict’s heroin-withdrawal symptoms. The second time, a different teacher was telling us about the torture of a political prisoner. In both cases, crash!–I fell off my chair unconscious.<\/p>\n
My doctor said, “I guess you’re not the kind of guy they use to apply pressure down in Guantanamo.” I replied, “I don’t think there’s any connection between my kind of empathy and real morality. But you’re probably right; I’m not suited for Gitmo.”<\/p>\n
(It seems to me, by the way, that morality takes guts, judgment, and principle as well as softness of heart.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was talking to my doctor today (I’m fine, thank you–a routine visit), and he happened to ask whether I had ever fainted. I told him that I had–twice, as a matter of fact, at about age 9 and age 12. The first time, the teacher was explaining about an addict’s heroin-withdrawal symptoms. The second […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoir"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}