The sun can be bright, but distant and indifferent to human suffering. Les Misrables, which was first published on April 1, 1862, wanted to be closer to the earth, and sensitive to French weeping. As its famous phrase says: "Those who do not weep, do not see."

That brutal, hopeless and never-ending history probably started in a small Palestinian town 15 kilometers southeast of Tel Aviv. Arabs call it al-Ludd (). The Jews now call it by its Biblical name Lod. It used to be known as Lydda.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.I am large. I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman

You do not take sides. You do not want your view obstructed by barricades. You want to show that behind every barricade, whether it be that group over there or this one here, perches the dirty and repugnant. There are schemes and tools of destruction at the ready. You want to stress that your role ('I am an intellectual', you say) is to oppose this. You want to underline clear thinking, unbiased standards of good, and listening to one's conscience.

One hundred years ago, a nineteen year old man fired his semi-automatic pistol at a husband and wife on a street corner in Sarajevo.

We are probably going to live as a society exhausted by lies. This year, 2014, is the year of the most brutal elections-brutal in the form of words-in the history of Indonesia since 1945. In this bitter process, we are almost constantly bombarded with 'facts' uttered only to be turned around, rebuttals made with no intention of finding out what is true, and, slowly but surely, the spread of mutual distrust-even hatred. And with this: the loss of serious conversation.