Solidarity

There are two brief sentences - more like aphorisms - that I would like to pick out from Eduardo Galeano's lyrical essay below on the photographs of Sebastião Salgado:

Charity, vertical, humilates. Solidarity, horizontal, helps.

Those six words resonate precisely with what Nelson Mandela said in London the other day:

Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.

Exactly how we work out our relationships in the great struggle of transforming the gross inequities of our age - the ways we construct the principles, processes and practices for the common actions of humankind - will have to be based on horizontal solidarities or not at all.