Ask yourself

I was in Minneapolis last month, and checked out the Sculpture Garden. The piece I spent the longest with was The Living Series by Jenny Holzer - twenty-eight white granite benches, set in square formation on the grass, each one etched with thoughts, ideas, opinions.

Two of these "truisms" got me thinking so hard, I copied them down. They brought back the Kenya Crisis with powerful immediacy - the experience of watching friends I'd grown up with and people I was close to morph into cowards or heroes.

You can watch people align themselves when trouble is in the air. Some prefer to be close to those at the top and others want to be close to those at the bottom. It's a question of who frightens them more and whom they want to be like.

By your response to danger it is easy to tell how you have lived and what has been done to you. You show whether you want to stay alive, whether you think you deserve to, and whether you believe it's any good to act.