Dissidents and outsiders saved lives and uplifted spirits during this dark period. We found each other and are still finding each other, making new and hopeful alliances. What are we learning? How are we repairing harms? Sadly, many, especially young people, still suffer trauma and fallout, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Every trend can be taken too far, but perhaps we should become more aware of how all this detachment from the world around us begins and be more skeptical. For my part, I would be happy knowing and following the actual local time again. Maybe we need sundials again. Our times are so rough, brutalized by a techno-fascist junta that forever wants to jab us and force us all into the metaverse, I’m finding the idea just a bit tempting.
Would You Have Resisted the Imposition of Time Zones? Continue Reading
All the complexities, contradictions, and riddles of human nature were present and still unresolved under the iconic contrapposto shadow of a statue symbolizing liberation and strength. There we were, admiring our age’s beauty and outrage, purposefully displayed by a wealthy former clown who ran a circus and built a city. Life really is the “Greatest Show on Earth.”
Over the past couple of years, the presentations I have seen have become, in my opinion, too caught up in left-wing/right-wing rhetoric, with a large majority of the slings and arrows directed at the right, such that the key historical lessons, in my opinion, have been missed. Given my belief that this country is divided in ways that have not been seen since the Civil War, this type of public discourse is only making matters worse.
Racism, Anti-Semitism, Genocide, and Eugenics in the COVID Era Continue Reading
Hiraeth may, indeed, embody a romantic, and at times overly mythical, sense of melancholy. But it is also a longing for some sort of vision conjured from the memory or from the imagination. In short, it is a longing for something for some sort of treasured ideal—and that ideal just might help us begin to imagine, and then to construct, the kind of world we do want to inhabit.
We long ago gave up the hope that all of this is random and coincidental, any more than it so happened that nearly every government in the world decided to plaster social distancing signs everywhere at the same time. Something is going on, something malevolent. The battle of the future really is between them and us but who or what “them” is remains opaque and too many of “us” are still confused about what the alternative is to what is happening all around us.
One thing we can do is attempt to glean new insights from the data we already have, and perhaps one day, when the current crop of suspiciously uninterested leaders has moved on, the trail will be picked up again by sincere people who want to get to the truth and have the resources to do it.
The analogy that Star Wars fans do not get is that the Evil Empire could be equated to the real rulers of the earth today. “The Resistance” might equate to the 10 percent of world citizens who are fighting back in the face of overwhelming odds. Why don’t more people understand who the Evil Empire really is…and who are really the Good Guys fighting back?
The Dark Side of the Force Isn’t Actually Paved in Black Continue Reading
We have certainly lived through the decline and fall of the older idea of the university. Now we may yet live to see the end of the university itself and its replacement by something else entirely. Reforms can work but the reform will not likely come from within the institutions. They must be imposed by alumni and perhaps legislatures. Or perhaps the rule of “Go woke, go broke” will eventually force a change. Regardless, the idea of learning itself will surely return. We are in the transition, and David Barnhizer is our Virgil to give us an outstanding tour of the wreckage left behind and perhaps even a path out of the darkness.
Lately I’ve been hearing that we had to lock down because the nation was in a panic as evidenced by the famous toilet paper shortage of the Spring of 2020. It’s not clear how this is supposed to work. How does a toilet paper shortage indicate the presence of a killer disease that can be mitigated by shutting everything down?
“How to struggle for justice without becoming what we claim to despise in our opponents?” That is the question. How well or poorly we as activists and idea-makers respond to this challenge in the short term will, I believe, go a long way toward predicting our long-term chances of building the more cohesive and human-centered culture we all desire for ourselves and our children.
In 2002 I did not know the extent of media malfeasance. Kristina, however, documented it in the most careful, credible and unbelievable way—collecting many chapters by top journalists of the stories they tried to report and how they lost their careers when they attempted to tell the truth. She lost her career at CBS, trying to tell the truth about the mid-air explosion of a 747 (TWA 800) over Long island sound, which was probably the result of a US Navy exercise gone awry.
Kristina Borjesson: Rest in Peace to a Brave Investigator Continue Reading
Search 4,000+ articles & events
