One of the perennial challenges facing any serious person is to be faithful when advocating for the rights of small and isolated groups in society. Think of people coming to Australia to seek protection, children acting antisocially, or Indigenous Australians in remote communities. To persevere you must keep seeing the members of the group as persons, each unique and each deserving of respect by virtue of their simple humanity, and so not to be treated as means to others' ends.
You must also reckon with the fact that the majority of people in society do not see them as such, but simply as indistinguishable members of a group who can be treated indiscriminately as the objects of policy. And finally, you must recognise that your efforts may be unavailing.
This difficulty can breed discouragement in which your commitment to respect the rights of people in the group weakens. You will also be tempted to accept as respectful slight ameliorations of brutality at the risk of eroding your commitment to respect.
An antidote to this, of course, is regularly to meet and appreciate the company of people in the communities you support. By doing so you keep fresh the vision of a humanity shared by all people, the right to respect of each human being, and the outrage of disrespect. You also recognise that this vision is a gift that needs to be nurtured. It is not to be taken for granted. Nurturing means finding strong and attractive words in which to express the vision, and becoming sensitive to the lazy abstractions and false alternatives in which conventional wisdom is expressed.
It might seem strange to turn to the poetic journey of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to illustrate this point. He was a Jesuit teacher who lived a reclusive life, troubled by deep depression. But good poetry always deepens your vision of the world.
His poetry seemed odd to his few contemporaries familiar with it. His condensed expression, rhythms and intensity set him apart from the more expansive style and expression of his fellow Victorian poets. They were confidently universal in their thought and expression, sharing the self-confident and lofty perspective to which Empire entitled them.
Underlying Hopkins' experiments with diction and rhythm lay a non-negotiable commitment to represent beings in their particularity. He reacted against the emphasis on the universal and the abstract in literature, theology and thought to catch and celebrate the particular.