Stories
August 2, 2024 9:28am
Today’s exercise: Pick 100 people at random from a phone book (do these still exist?). Ask each of them to write three short descriptive stories (one paragraph) illustrating the culture in which they live.
What do you think we’d get? What would your own stories describe? Take a minute to at least come up with the topics/subjects of your stories.
So, what did you settle on?
What best illustrates your culture? Did you include religious faith, human rights, intellectual ideals, and freedoms? Or did you perhaps write about crime, prison, or oppression? Maybe you wrote about welfare, unemployment, and addiction. Or did you write about aging, poor health, and hopelessness? OK, maybe you wrote about optimism, plans, and a bright future.
I think culture may be intensely personal for many.
In England, there are protests because the 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants stabbed to death three little girls aged 6, 7, and 9 at a dance studio.
The protestors are writing their stories now.
Soylent Green
August 2, 2024 7:16pm
There has been a good deal of talk about the imminent population collapse and many reasons are cited. Most attribute it to the costs of starting a family but an article I just read speculated that it is an existential dilemma – that people see little meaning in life and having children does not fulfill this need for meaning. It seems that we are becoming so self-reflective, so inward-looking that we do not want anything or anyone interfering with that constant analysis. The US is below replacement fertility (2.1 kids per mom to maintain population) and South Korea is the lowest with each female, on average, producing only 0.72 children.
Anyone remember Soylent Green? That 1973 movie suggested a Malthusian horror view of the future in which we would euthanize over-populated humans and process the bodies into a food called Soylent Green.
Fifty years later, we’re worried the entire race of humans will disappear from the face of the Earth.
Here’s the article – The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids
Leopardi at Lightspeed
August 3, 2024 7:39
I am sitting in my dream chair reading Leopardi who has just accelerated to light speed with regard to his observations of the human condition. I am drinking ale and feeling all of space and time. A robin feeds her young in the crotch of a barn support aided by the father who darts in with additional food for the young. Do you suppose these parents are aware of “love” for each other or do they fulfill their genetic duty?
Leopardi says:
“When a man falls in love, the whole world dissolves before his eyes. He no longer sees anything other than the object of his love….I have never experienced a thought that abstracts the mind so powerfully from everything as love….” – Giacomo Leopardi.
More Leopardi:
“I’ve always been sickened by people’s stupidities and by the trivial and vile and ridiculous things they say and do…but I’ve never felt such horrible disgust…as when I felt love …. where, made sensitive…I needed to withdraw…at the slightest pettiness, baseness, and coarseness, whether in actions or words, whether moral or physical…. such as tasteless gossip, crude jokes, coarse gestures, and a hundred other such things.” – Giacomo Leopardi
Was it really love? Are not others cognizant of our own coarseness? What keeps us together then? Passion cools but love is that devotion to our beloved even when momentary emotion leads us apart.
What Can We Question?
August 12, 2024 9:45am
I have been concerned with the censorship that we see around the world and especially in the UK. The frustration over the stabbing deaths of three little girls – committed by the English-born son of Rwandan immigrants, has galvanized the people to take to the streets to protest immigration policy. The government has imprisoned social media users for calling for violence. Now, most of us would support moves to quell violence but the methods are bordering on the edge of totalitarianism. Perhaps the leaders in the UK should think about the policies they have implemented that have led to this state of affairs. How far are we from imprisoning people for their opinions…. for Orwell’s “crimethink.” We may be closer than many believe.
This is beyond censorship. It flies in the face of every right ever conceived by the mind of humans. If our freedom of speech is curtailed, we will soon have no rights because we are not allowed to talk about preserving them. One man in the UK was imprisoned for printing anti-immigration bumper stickers. Now, to be fair, the exact message of the stickers was not provided but the man had a history of extreme views so the judge may be correct about the inflammatory content.
Nevertheless, we are on a slippery surface when unpopular speech is curtailed for any reason. Years ago, the ACLU would have been all over this, it protected the right of extremist views. It was known for protecting the rights of known pornographers so that all other questionable speech would also be sacrosanct. Now, the ACLU is nowhere to be found.
This drift in society and politics is unquestionable and scary.
Just this morning, I posted a response to a respected blogger acquaintance that was civil but blunt about my questions regarding the Jewish/Israeli lobby called AIPAC and its influence in US politics. Here’s a link I included:
My response was promptly deleted. I questioned this and was told that the response would provoke his Jewish friends. So, even a civil question about an influential lobby is regarded as too controversial these days.
All the anti-fa folks better take note. This Orwellian future is coming for all of us.