look further.

"we are living in impossible times. if it were fiction it would be critiqued as hyperbolic. if it were nightmares we would never sleep. we are living in times created by our own species. I can't remember the last time my tears weren't man-made.

it feels like everything is broken. we must, each of us, fix our attention on the nearest wound, conjure within us the smallest parts of ourselves that are still whole, and be healers. heal with words and prayer and energy, heal with money, clean water, time and action. 

there's enough destruction. there's enough nothingness swallowing the living world. don't add to it. there's enough. 

our visions are ropes through the devastation. look further ahead, like our ancestors did, look further. extend, hold on, pull, evolve."

                - Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy, 2018 

Embrace distinct histories

"When the groups most affected by these issues insist on acknowledgment of their intrinsic difference, it should not be viewed as divisive. Embracing the distinct histories and identities of groups in a democracy enhances the complexity and capacity of the whole."

                    - Stacey Abrams, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2018

Conspiracy

Conspiracies obscure the future. When we focus on conspiracies, we think about what happened. Conspiracy-thinking anchors our hopes about how discovery of the conspiracy will magically lead to change, rather than the things that create real change. The only way to counter a message of the imaginary past is to imagine a glorious future. People who resist authoritarian power often say that things were great before the authoritarian rose to power, and that we need to go back to how things were. Of course the resistance needs to focus on what to salvage, but someone needs to think about the future says Gessen. One of the reasons a complex world becomes so frightening is that people can no longer imagine the future. Citing Erich Fromm's Escape From Freedom, Gessen talks about how rootless people become when they can no longer imagine their future. 

To defy conspiracy thinking, we need to engage with reality, says Gessen. Accept new information as something that exists in context, and just what you're learning today. Conspiracies pull us into our online universe of ever-spiraling conspiracy theorizing. 

- N. Mathias, July 21, 2017, summarizing and reflecting on Masha Gessen's talk. 

an obligation to imagine

We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

 - Neil Gaiman, Guardian, June 2017

reverence or remembrance

At this moment, while leadership in our country has opened the doors to much more hate, and at the same time, when memorials and tributes to historic leaders of hate are being taken down, these words and this distinction between reverence vs remembrance is important:

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth....These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for....
We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now. No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain. 

-- NOLA Mayor Mitch Landrieu, on removing the prominent Robert E Lee statue (May 2017)

today: the first day a river is declared human

"The Whanganui River, New Zealand's third-longest, will be represented by one member from the Maori tribes, known as iwi, and one from the Crown.

"The recognition allows it to be represented in court proceedings."

 From the BBC.

The Responsibility of Intellects

With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

- Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellects (1967)