The Inner Price of Corruption

Corruption eventually turns on its creator. "...a politics which Libby and others inside the executive branch acted to corrupt, and which is now turning upon them." Stirling Newberry, "Deconstructing the Indictment", truthout, Oct. 28, 2005. The makers of corruption never understand the nature of the process which they unleash. Cynically, we are inured to corruption in daily life, how much more in politics, yet we still believe, and will continue to believe that purity is possible. We have to, it's what keeps us alive. Those who open the stream of corruption never fail to believe that it is controllable. It would be so easy, they think, simple to choke it off when it gets risky. A lie is always an attempt to avoid risk. But opening oneself to risk is ultimately what cleanses the heart. And when we refuse to clease ourselves, then God and nature take us in hand and the shower begins. All I can advise those who must suffer indictment and trial, and our prayers must be with them, is that as we open our hearts to the suffering which honesty invariably brings, we will taste the bitter herb which Oscar Wilde spoke of, and perhaps we will learn, as so many of us who have committed less visible crimes, that "Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rock where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole." Oscar Wilde, "De Profundis"