In December 2000, when the presidential election was still up in the air, I covered the raucous protests in Washington, with crowds converging on Blair House to support Al Gore as president, and other crowds forming across the road calling him "Sore Loserman," a play on Gore/Lieberman.
There is a Catholic church near the Naval Observatory, and one afternoon I met an older man standing outside it with a sign protesting sexual abuse by Catholic priests. I talked to him and he showed me photographs of himself as a young man, before and after his abuse. "Look at how cheerful I was here, and then look at the shadow that came over my life. I lost my smile!" he cried. He went out to the church every week, to reclaim his life.
When I got home I told my wife about the case and said I wanted to write an article about the man. My wife doesn’t usually reflect the conventional wisdom, but she did then; she said, Sure it happened, but don’t you have better things to do than write about nuts.
The other day the Pope apologized for sexual abuse by priests, and said he was ashamed, and yesterday he met with victims of that abuse. He did so because this became a giant human rights scandal in the last few years. My meeting outside that church was just before the deluge.
I pass this story on to make one small point: Sometimes we think we are crazy to be taking on a moral cause. And then overnight the world changes.
