This Comment is by Carla Smith on Tom Matlack’s post “Is There a Moral to John Edwards?“

In “Great House” Nicole Krauss writes: ““We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.” Or, as you put it so well, we collectively look for that crack in the armour and more often than not, we find it. It is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, of which we collectively play no small part, a Hunger Games mentality of it’s own. Where real power lies is when men and/or women take honest stock and admit to those they love their all too human frailities. In owning our humanity, we open space for others to be human, too. There are few things more attractive than a real man standing before you and saying, “This is who I am.” Or as Clint Eastwood sings in the opening verse of Gran Torino, ( a powerful 1:30 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1_m-8CTNVU)

“So tenderly your story is
nothing more than what you see
or what you’ve done or will become
standing strong do you belong
in your skin; just wondering…”