Yet in these days of mass communication, reality is much harder to escape. Our forefathers rarely had to cope with tragedies any larger than those found in a single village or a small farming community. But we are confronted every day with images of mass terror, of multitudes of people devastated by all the ills that plague mankind. From government policies of starvation to countless varieties of religious wars, the 20th century is one huge Domesday Book, a catalogue of horrors so vast that numbers lose human meaning. The atrocities nag at our conscience, finally numbing it.
Amnesia seems the only solace.
People want TV evangelists. They want gurus and answer people. They want simple solutions. They do not want ambiguity, and they do not want freedom, and they don't want a cross. They want someone else doing things for them.