Culture:
“Culture is the matrix on which the fragile human animal draws to remain socially healthy. As fish need the sea, culture, with its timeless reassurance and its seeming immortality, offsets for the frail human spirit the brevity, the careless accidentalness of life. An individual human life is easy to extinguish. Culture is leaned on as eternal. It flows large and old around its children. And it is very hard to kill. Its murder must be undertaken over hundreds of years of countless generations. Pains must be taken to snuff out every traditional practice, every alien word, every heaven-sent ritual, every pride, every connection of the soul, gone behind and reaching ahead. The carriers of the doomed culture must be ridiculed and debased and humiliated. This must be done to their mothers and their fathers, their children, their children’s children and their children after them. And there will come a time of mortal injury to all of their souls, and their culture will breathe no more. But they will not mourn its passing, for they will by then have forgotten that which they might have mourned.” -From, “The Debt” By: Randall Robinson