[Daycare Nation]

I'm reading an essay by Simone Weil called "The Love of God and Affliction."

The word "affliction" here is the French "mahleur," for which we don't have a proper translation--the word carries with it a sense of inevitability and doom.

It's really interesting--she talks about how criminals feel none of the repercussions of their crimes. Those who feel it are the innocent--the affliction is greater the more innocent the victim.

Affliction is brought on by physical pain but is not the same as pain...It drains the soul and takes away its will. The duty of the afflicted is to persevere in love, in spite of the fact that the blind, brute mechanism of nature has oppressed and mutilated him with random indifference.

"Men have the same carnal nature as animals. If a hen is hurt, the others rush upon it, attacking it with their beaks. This phenomenon is as automatic as gravitation. Our senses attach all the scorn, all the revulsion, all the hatred that our reason attaches to crime, to affliction. Except for those whose soul is inhabited by Christ, everybody despises the afflicted to some extent, although practically no one is conscious of it."