***** “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” [ John 8: 32 ]
Some thoughts on America’s future from George Packer’s visit to the Phoenix area. Excerpts from “The Valley,: The Atlantic; July-August, 2024 ]:
“Democracy is..a fragile artifice. It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls – belief, virtue, restraint. It’s durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the Valley. And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.”………..
“If, like almost everything else in American politics, water turns deeply partisan and ideological, contaminated by conspiracy theories and poisoned with memes, then preserving this drought-stricken civilization will get a lot harder, like trying to solve Rubik’s Cube while fending off a swarm of wasps that you might be hallucinating.”…….
*** “We are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity.” [ Oscar Wilde ]
“In a place like Maryvale, you realize how righteously stupid the culture wars make both sides. There’s no reason to think that great books and moral education have anything to do with MAGA. There’s no reason reading Virgil should require banning children from changing names. There’s no reason to view Western civilization as simply virtuous or vicious, only as the one that most shaped our democracy. There’s no reason to dumb down humanistic education and expect our society to become more just. If we could do something about the true impediments to the Cortez family’s dreams – if Fabian could earn enough from his backbreaking work for the six of them to live in four rooms instead of two; if insurance could cover treatment for Ericka’s illnesses so she doesn’t have to delay seeing a doctor until her life is threatened; if the local public schools could give their daughters a safe and decent education; if America could allow the family to stop being afraid and live in the sunlight – then by all means let’s get back to fighting over name changes and reading lists.” ……….
*** ” [Our prejudices are] so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.”
[ George Bernard Shaw ]
“Identity is a pernicious form of political division, because its appeal is based on traits we don’t choose and can’t change. It’s inherently irrational, and therefore likely to lead to violence. Identity politicians – and Trump is one – don’t win elections and arguments about ideas, or by presenting a vision of a world more attractive than their opponent’s. They win by appealing to the solidarity of group identity, which has to be mobilized by whipping up fear and hatred of other groups.” …………..
*** “When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us, power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness.” [ Dale Carnegie ]
“Unlike identities, ideas are open to persuasion, and persuasion depends on understanding and reaching other people. But when partisanship itself becomes a group identity, a tribal affiliation with markers as clear as Jeff Zink’s handgun, dividing us into mutually unintelligible blocs with incompatible realities, then the stakes of every election are existential, and it becomes hard to live together in the same country without killing one another.” …………….
*** “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” [ Martin Luther King, Jr. ]
{Note: ironically – Charlie Kirk is mentioned for ‘the business model” of a speech he delivered……………… ]
With Justice For All 