Nicholas Kulish on Cash

From today's NYT (and I hope quoting a bit isn't breaking the rules). In an excellent short piece on Cash, Kulish reminds us of one of Johnny Cash's noblest traits--a powerful and genuine empathy--even as he impugns our short-sighted disregard for our massive prison population:

In a world increasingly reduced to good and evil, to us versus them, Johnny Cash was a man unafraid to admit that he was both. We've somehow lost sight of the trush that there can be no redemption without sin. It's this kind of reductive thinking that makes it easy to reduce swaths of the country to color codes and political parties; to lock millions away in jails and prisons, then toss the keys without guilt.

Johnny Cash sang that he wore black "for the poor and beaten down livin' on the hopeless, hungry side of town." With hundreds of thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina, layoff announcements dangling over the heads of 98,000 American auto workers, and 2.1 million men and women in prisons and jails across the country, we still need him.

Yep.