Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.John F. Kennedy

Spared

Chen Kegui is the nephew of Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese activist who arrived in the United States recently. When the Chinese authorities were looking for his uncle and stormed his house partly to make sure Chen Guangcheng wasn’t there and partly to harass his father and himself, there was an altercation, one of the policemen died and Chen Kegui is now being charged with murder. Shakeel Alfridi is the Pakistani surgeon enlisted by the CIA to essentially run a phony vaccination program in Abbottabad so they could obtain DNA from relatives of Osama Bin Laden. He was tried away from the press and perhaps secretly, convicted of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison. We can be very glib about speaking about gratitude, but if our reasons for feeling or citing it do not include our freedom from injustice, then our gratitude is most likely shallow.