One of the many personal characteristics that make me such a bore is that I get almost no pleasure whatever from a job well done. Today I crossed two items off my “to do” list, things I’d been working up to for about a week. In intervals. When I wasn’t coughing or having a lie-down to recoup my strength. (I’m getting better, thanks to antibiotics, but it’s a process.)

And not a morsel of satisfaction does my frontal cortex vouchsafe me. I’ve heard of people being gratified by a job well done, but I’ve almost never had the experience.

Enough about that.

Like most of us, I’ve been thinking about the murder of Henry Nowak in Southampton, England recently. Everybody has a lesson to draw from it. Here’s mine:

Lots of us have wondered, over the years, how we would have stood up – morally – in Nazi Germany. Would we have defied the Nazis? Kept our heads down and our mouths shut? Knuckled under and collaborated?

I think we can be sure of one thing.

If you’re okay with a system that treats race as a moral category, you would not have defied the Nazis. If you think you can judge a person by the color of their skin, and that the authorities should too, you would not have defied the Nazis.

Now the fact that you (or I) can’t accept such a system doesn’t prove that you (or I) would actually be a Bonhoeffer. Things get real quite fast when your life’s on the actual line.

But if you can’t even agree that justice ought to be colorblind, you’re on the Field Gray side of things.