An Honest Man

There was one who pondered. What the speaker had said lingered on and disturbed him. Socialism and communism are not conjured-up hobgoblins. There is something very real and very evil afoot. But what is the substance of this evil? He had heard many speakers inveigh against socialism, and damn communism. Always the speakers were naming names, always they were talking about someone else. How could there be this guilty “someone else,” he asked himself, if everybody talked about someone else. This someone else had to be somebody who himself was at fault, or all this talk was absurd. Guilt must come to rest somewhere. Could some of it be in him? In honesty he had to ask himself this question, for now he understood the absurdity of the shallow belief that all these faults belonged to “someone else.”