Mob Mentality:
By coincidence, soon after writing the last post, I viewed The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), a western about a group of cowboys who lynch three men accused of murder and cattle rustling only to later find out they were incident. Henry Fonda plays a taciturn drifter who gets swept into the posse then joins a group of objectors to the mob looking to punish someone, anyone. In the closing scene, Fonda reads a letter that the condemned man left to his wife. I reprint here verbeatim as a reminder of the times we are living in, in this country called America.
“A man just naturally can’t take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurtin’ everybody in the world, ’cause then he’s just not breaking one law but all laws. Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It’s everything people ever have found out about justice and what’s right and wrong. It’s the very conscience of humanity. There can’t be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience? And what is anybody’s conscience except a little piece of the conscience of all men that ever lived?”