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The trouble with blurring moral distinctions, even for the best of causes, is that it can become a habit. It is a habit we can ill afford, since the modern tolerance for such distinctions is already in decline. Some serious ideas are used so promiscuously in the service of so many causes that they have lost all their power. Genocide, for example, has been used to describe almost every kind of perceived injustice, from Viet Nam to pornography to Third World birth control. A new word, holocaust, has to be brought in as a substitute. But its life before ultimate trivialization will not be long. Only last month a financial commentator on PBS, referring to a stock-market drop, spoke of the holocaust year of 1981. The host did not blink.
Counted your spoons lately?
— By Charles Krauthammer