Weighing on me

A pervasive sadness has lain on me lately. The 2009 Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, which describes the annual killing of dolphins in a national park in Japan, went back to the library yesterday unwatched. I told the librarian, "I just didn't have the courage to watch it."
    As I waited in line at Costco's optical shop on Friday, I had, on several huge HDTV screens, watched the complaisant exultation of two overfed fishermen who had just landed a huge fish on their boat and were displaying it for the videographer.
    For several days, I've been listening to Timothy B. Tyson's 2004 account of the racially motivated 1970 murder of Henry Marrow, a black man, in Oxford, North Carolina, Blood Done Sign My Name. Forty years later, we still haven't seen the last of white supremacy in this country, and we may be as unlikely ever to see it as we are to see the last of the human presumption that dolphins and fishes and other creatures have less right to live than we do.
    I don't know why the weight of this racial immorality should be lying so heavily on me precisely now, but its balance could have been tilted on Saturday night by my watching Michael Moore's 2009 expose, Capitalism: A Love Story. I think that its incontrovertible thesis that Jesus would not have approved of capitalism thrust a sword into my breast for having theretofore had little reaction to the causes of the financial crisis of 2007–2010. I suspect, that is, that I'm suffering remorse for my own apathy, as well as despair that the weak and powerless of the earth will continue to come in last.