LH

“What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“They were human, and the longer they worked there, the more often they found themselves in situations that forced them to ask the same questions over and over again. Is it worth it, doing incremental good in an imperfect system? Can you be a good person and work somewhere where something like this happens? Paul and many of the employees at Crownsville remind me of a story I grew up hearing from the Caribbean side of my family. One of my aunts in particular loved the Starfish Story. Legend has it that a young Black boy—in Haiti or Cuba or the Dominican Republic, you choose—is walking along a beach that is littered with starfish. Thousands upon thousands of starfish have washed up onto the shore following a terrible storm and they are helpless, dehydrating in the sun. So the little boy begins picking the starfish up one by one and throwing them back into their home in the water. Other people at the beach look at the boy, laugh, and call him naive. One person approaches him and tells him bluntly, “Give up. It makes no difference. You’ll never be able to save all of these starfish.” The boy pauses for a second. He looks up, then leans back down to toss another starfish into the sea. “It makes a difference for that one.” Many of the people of Crownsville decided that it was better to throw as many starfish back into the ocean as they could rather than abandon them all on the shore.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“You have two paths in front of you. One leads to certain death, the other…the unknown. You know which is which, and I trust you will choose correctly.”
― Jeremy Robinson, Unleashed