It calls for compassion which leads to action to be of real help, but above all commitment to suffering humanity. The anguish of our generations has been almost perpetual in this terrible 20th century. And yet we may not surrender to that paralysis of despair. The hope of being able to work for a better, saner, world is not a delusion. All worthwhile ideals throughout history have been the result of the refusal to relinquish the struggle, the responses to the so often desperate challenges of living.
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the man yet to come.
Our generation certainly knows what Nietzsche had in mind. We have been battered in our ideals again and again. But that fact does not allow the assumption that all hope is discredited or totally naive. It is the essential message of humanism that men and women like us can rise above hopelessness. But there is a price, affirming the indispensable worth of the other.