“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Norbert Merkle, long dead, younger than I am now when I knew him, taught me how to clean a classroom, wash chalkboards, make porcelain toilets and urinals gleam, leave no floor undone. And more. For four years he was my boss in the Science building at college. He was its maintenance man and I was a callow boy who lucked into a job as a part-time custodian, work that kept […]
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I am not sure of the precise point when information took on the elements of a barrage, what now feels like an eternal explosive babble, but it happened during my lifetime. In its overwhelming nature, that barrage confuses, distracts, and dulls thought. It both infuriates and encloses one in a secure area of like-minded ideas and thus is fundamentally shallow and sensational in nature. It is destructive of solitude and […]
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Your child before you is a child anywhere. We are singing ‘Wheels on the Bus’. The child before me stands up and trundles over the pillows to turn and face the others who wait for her to make the noise of a bull charging. She roars her squeaky roar, and they all follow when the bull rides the bus, roaring and swaying, the Indian boys, the Bangladeshi, the Chinese-African-American girl, […]
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(A Note: the addendums and footnotes after the main Post may be worth your time to read. I have not recorded them.) More and more I think in long screams of fury and powerlessness. Or I imagine the US as one of those spinning cylinders at a fairgrounds, the Rotors, where you pay your money to be held fast against a wall by centrifugal force and the floor drops out […]
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