Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“As humans, we’ve always found ourselves haunted by our past mistakes, both as a personal matter of guilt, shame, or embarrassment and as a communal matter of reputation (up to and including potential ostracism). On the latter front, I’m old enough — and I’m not THAT old — to remember a time when anyone but the most public of public figures could … move to another county and start over, among new neighbors who neither knew of, nor had any reason to suspect, their prior violations of social norms. Clean slates, and if they nailed the ‘sin no more’ part of ‘go and sin no more,’ new and better lives. … That kind of thing can’t really happen today … and for the last 20 years or so we’ve been watching what happens instead.” (03/10/26)