Life, the Universe, and everything in it.
The artist Anselm Kiefer is new to me but has been around for a long time. I like this quote of his.
Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas.
Anselm Kiefer
This quote is fitting since he was born in Germany at the end of World War 2. This guy is literally the personification of rebirth from ruins.
His art looks amazing. I’ll have to check it out in person next time I’m in New York.
I keep trying to explain this Israel-Hamas war to my kids, and it’s really so caught up in the past, both near and distant. Repeatedly, one side’s autonomy, safety, and identity is violated by the other. And it’s piled up over time to the current conflict.
The Daily tackles this history in their 1948 episode, describing an “arsenal of memory” that gets “chiseled in stone” to define each side’s grievances.
When you go to the Middle East, you see immediately how people are imprisoned by history, the especially in Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Daily
It’s understandable but tragically and obviously unhelpful.
Yes, the past is full or pain and terror. Don’t get stuck in it – move past it like any wise person would do.
Right actions for the future are the best apologies for wrong ones in the past.
Tryon Edwards, theologian
And yes, it can be done.
Ireland put a similar conflict behind it: a centuries-old conflict of two intertwined groups of people involving religion, culture, territorial disputes, terror, violence, and injustice.
They ended up with a two-state solution: Ireland and the UK. There is peace and prosperity. People move freely between the countries. There are no checkpoints, walls, vengeance deaths, or bombings.
There are pubs and museums, a peaceful countryside, and a booming film industry.
The past is recognized and understood but no longer used to justify self-destructive, violent behavior. The “Troubles” are gone, but not forgotten.
The world needs to step up and make this happen in the Middle East. Doing so will require setting aside some fear, which is just a mind killer, but a peaceful solution can happen because it has happened elsewhere.
I talk about the news sometimes with my daughter, who is in middle school.
Today I told her that Israel was attacked, and hundreds are dead. I played the The Daily for her in the car. It described unarmed people being indiscriminately mowed down by gunmen, people being abducted, families being intentionally ripped apart.
And that’s just day one.
It was a hard thing to have to play for my daughter, but I want her to know what people are capable of at their worst.
She listened silently for about 20 minutes. When we stopped the car, you could tell she was moved and deeply saddened. She pretty well boiled it down in a few words.
That’s a sad story. I don’t understand the purpose of war.
Well said, my friend.
She asked why this happened, and I tried to explain it: all the history and terrible conditions and politics and religion and blah blah blah blah blah. Here eyes glazed over.
Because it didn’t make sense to her.
Because, it really just doesn’t make any fucking sense. Nobody wins this thing.
Intentionally killing scores of unarmed people at a music festival is not a military operation and can never be justified no matter how twisted your logic is, Hamas, you idiots. By now most of the people who did killing are dead too, certainly burning in hell if there is such a thing.
Sometimes a war is necessary, but this one seems to have gotten off to a really shitty start even with that framing.
Good luck, everyone in Israel and Gaza.
I really hope there is a Good Friday Agreement somewhere in your future so you can one day make some sweet tunes with your family instead of cutting off the water supply and burying bodies.
On Tyranny is a short, coffee-table book packed so dense with so much useful and practical information that it eludes a super summary. So like Show Your Work, I’ll be covering the best parts individually here as snippets.
The book looks at simple, real-world ways we can all protect democracy and fight tyranny.
We Americans get a chance to collectively take pride in our country every year on July 4. Serendipitously placed in the middle of summer, we get to enjoy endless grill & chill opportunities, pool parties, hot dog eating contests, even dance parties. And of course, fireworks. 🇺🇸🌭🎆
I’m not sure how people in most other countries celebrate their national identities, but I am grateful that we have decided to celebrate as a fun, collective national party rather than, say, a military parade or a grim political speech.
Those military parades and political speeches are signs of nationalism, which is, “endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge”, according to On Tyranny.
Sadly, a some of this type of nationalism is familiar to us Americans as well.
In contrast to this bitter nationalism, it is good and helpful to be a patriot, because patriots brings out our best selves based on real, universal values.
A patriot… wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves.
A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained.
A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.
So go ahead, be a patriot. We’ll all be better off for it. ✌️
When we look at the sun, we see yellow or maybe white. But the thing is, we’re not actually looking at the sun, which is technically green.
Apparently we see tis green star as white because our eyes and brains are simply overwhelmed. To me, this misperception is an extreme example of this idea:
👉 The way you perceive something says as much about you as it does about the thing you’re observing.
I think this idea applies to people too. Whether you think someone is a jerk or super cool, it may say as much about your own experiences, aspirations, and assumptions as it does about that person.
On the one hand, this phenomenon can help you make lasting friendships and fall in love, while on the other hand it can feed dumb-ass biases like racism, sexism, and all the others.
This idea kind of reminds me of a Jesse Jackson joke from an old Saturday Night Live skit.
I do not deny the allegation, I deny the allegator.
Jessie Jackson on SNL
When I start to suspect my perceptions may be playing a trick on me, I try to back up, gather more information, and make sure it’s not me. Because sometimes it is. ☀️
Mental Break Town 