I Still Believe
These days, belief in innocence is unfashionable. There are good reasons for this: innocence is associated with a nauseatingly prudish view of the world and with deliberately keeping people ignorant so as not to "corrupt" them. People suffer greatly from this kind of forced ignorance and I'd be very glad to see the back of it. There are worse reasons for it, too. Holding all members of a large and often unchosen group guilty of or responsible for something is a timeless classic, sometimes justified but mostly - especially when meting out punishments - not. As you'd expect with collective punishment, the most vulnerable get the worst of it - the young, the poor, or the disabled, for example. Those who are more culpable also probably have the resources to mitigate their punishment, because the world is a horrible place like that. I feel like one of the reasons that belief in innocence is unfashionable is because it means that these people did not deserve the punis...