Sirius - who is right?

[marinafrants]

No: HPFGUIDX 73603

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "naamagatus" <naama_gat at h...> 
wrote:
> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "marinafrants" 
<rusalka at i...> 
> wrote:
> 
> Short of throwing him back into 
> > Azkaban, I can't think of anything more cruel Dumbledore 
could've 
> > done to him.
> 
> There's just an itsy bitsy little problem with this: it was 
*Sirius* 
> who offered the house to the Order. He said (bitterly, if I 
remember 
> correctly), that it was the only thing he could do to help. So, 
> although he did indeed suffer locked in that house, nobody made 
him 
> do it or even asked him to put himself in that situation. 

Sirius offering the house for the Order's use is one thing.  Sirius 
being forced to stay in that house with nothing useful to do and 
nowhere to go is another thing.  The first does not require the 
second.  The Order could've used the house even if Sirius was 
staying somewhere else, or coming and going on missions, or, at the 
very least, doing something more constructive than house cleaning.  
Dumbledore had managed to find appropriate work for everyone else in 
the order, including the unreliable and barely-competent Mundungus, 
but it apparently never occured to him to bother with Sirius' case.  
I don't think Dumbledore was being intentionally cruel to Sirius, 
any more than he was being intentionally cruel to Harry by holding 
himself at a distance all year.  It seems to me that he was so 
caught up in his abstract schemes and stratagems that he lost sight 
of the fact that the pieces he was moving around on his mental 
chessboard were actual human beings.

Marina
rusalka at ix.netcom.com