We Learn From Books and Movies

Likely you've read The Ox-Bow Incident; either in junior high or high school. It was a movie in 1942, and TCM just ran it, and I caught the end of it. The wiki has the details on the book and the film if you're interested. The point of the story is that vigilantes get it wrong. Kind of like today's leaders.

The last full scene of the film has Henry Fonda reading a letter from one of the hanged men to his wife. His pal, Henry Morgan tells Fonda he can't read the letter; he can't read at all. So Fonda takes advantage and reads it aloud. Loud enough for the rest of the mob/vigilantes in the bar can hear, too. This is most, it sounds like all of it.

Man just naturally can't take the law into his own
hands and hang people without hurting everybody in
the world, because then he's just not breaking one
law, but all laws.
   Law's a lot more than words you put in a book,
or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it
out. It's everything people ever have found out about
justice and what's right and wrong. It's the very con-
science of humanity.
   There can't be any such thing as civilization
unless people have a conscience, because if people
touch God anywhere, where is it except through their
conscience? And what is anyone's conscience except a
little piece of the conscience of all men who ever
lived?

I surely don't know how the programmers at TCM came to choose the film for today. The channel runs various "theme" days, and this month is Lone Good Guys in Westerns, or thereabouts. Alicia Malone was the presenter, and didn't draw the obvious analogy with the likes of shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw. May be TCM is chary, too.