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Leaving Twitter

I deleted my Twitter/X account a couple of weeks ago. After being on the site for fourteen years, I admit that it was difficult to let go. Mine wasn’t a huge account, with only a few thousand followers, but Twitter had been good to me. It helped me forge professional contacts, share some writing, even get invited to conferences and be interviewed by journalists. And of course there was some time to follow news, goof off, and just interact with people around the world.

However, after the change of ownership to Elon Musk, the site seemed to change for the worse, with an increase in ethnic slurs and hate speech, and a decrease in oversight. There appears to be an exodus of academics from Twitter, as networks gradually deteriorated and the algorithm seemed to sideline old voices in favor of more sensational, even hate-filled tweets. The journal Nature mentioned one analysis which found that a handful of controversial, previously obscure, accounts that Musk personally recommended or interacted with had exploded in popularity after only a year.

I know there are many more important issues than this. Some friends suggested I stay there and “take up space,” make your voice known, etc. Knowing the old maxim about the Internet, “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold,” ultimately I felt ethically torn by remaining there and being a product for a site that was going in a direction I disagreed with. So, I guess that’s that.

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A Window in the Skies

Current events leave me searching for reasons for optimism, so I turn to one of my favorite videos. It’s raw energy, the editing is spot-on, and the sentiment behind it (the love can leave open better possibilities) is needed.

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The Children of This Earth

And still they teach you in your school
About those glorious days of rule
And how it’s your destiny to be
Superior to me
But if you’ve any kind of mind
You’ll see that all human kind
Are the children of this earth
And your hate for them will chew you up and spit you out

-Damien Dempsey, “Colony”

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The Trapeze Artist

I will have more essays soon. During the pandemic, I hope you don’t mind me taking the easy way out by sharing another song. I can’t say that I completely understand all of the lyrics, though the idea of wanting to be remembered probably stands out.  Perhaps it’s better to let everyone have their own interpretation. Anyway, I just liked it. 
 

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The Parting Glass

I don’t plan to go for a while but when the time comes, play this at my funeral.

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Ain’t it enough?

A friend shared this song by Old Crow Medicine Show with me years ago, and for some reason I am finding it relevant today. Maybe because it agrees with a “life is beautiful” perspective, that we are all mortal beings on an ancient planet, even though – as James Baldwin wrote – we tend to imprison ourselves by denying our mortality and focusing on other things, most of which are human constructs. It also jibes with a cosmically connected primates theme, at a time when people don’t feel particularly connected.

This isn’t my typical genre of music, but I try to be open to different styles. If you like something, that’s all that counts, I guess. This one, to me, is beautiful. Anyway, if you haven’t heard it before I hope you enjoy it.

Lyrics

Show me a river, I’ll show you an ocean
I’ll show you a castle turn into sand
For we rise and we fall, and we crash on the coastlines
And only our love will last ’til the end

Fortune is fleeting, time is deceiving
Our bodies are weak and they turn into dust
Though following blindly, but love is like lightning
It strikes only one time, and ain’t it enough?

Ain’t it enough to live by the ways of the world
To be part of the picture, whatever it’s worth?
Throw your arms around each other and love one another
For it’s only one life that we’ve got and ain’t it enough?

Surely all people are made for each other
To join in together when the days turn to dust
So let the prison walls crumble, and the borders all tumble
There is a place for us all here and ain’t it enough?

Ain’t it enough to live by the ways of the world
To be part of the picture, whatever it’s worth?
Throw your arms around each other and love one another
For it’s only one life that we’ve got and ain’t it enough?

Late in the evening, feeling the wind blow
Talk through the treetops, warm in the sun
Lying beside you, watching the moon rise
If that’s all there is, babe, ain’t it enough?

Show me a river, I’ll show you an ocean
The stars just like diamonds all shining above
Where the heavens are beaming and all the world’s dreaming
Peace everlasting and ain’t it enough?

Ain’t it enough to live by the ways of the world
To be part of the picture, whatever its worth?
Throw your arms around each other and love one another
For it’s only one life that we’ve got and ain’t it enough?

Ain’t it enough?

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Book Plug: Hivemind

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while. Sarah Rose Cavanagh published her book “Hivemind: The New Science of Tribalism in Our Divided World” last year. Sarah is a psychologist at Assumption College who studies human emotions and how these connect to well-being and learning. 

Her book is a joy to read, written in a fun and personable — but informative — style. She interviewed several academics and thinkers about their views on human sociality (disclaimer: I’m one of them), and she has some lessons on how to help make modern technology and social media work in our favor. For example: “Use social media for connection…. Dial down the outrage, dial up the empathy.”

Sarah has a good heart and a good head, and I think she’s put together a great book here that can help make the world a little bit better place. 

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2020: To Our Braver, Bolder Selves

With the start of the new year, it’s usually a time for reviews and lists — accomplishments, things that went wrong, etc. etc. Last year was a slow one on this blog, and I didn’t publish much for a few reasons. For one, I felt I lost my audience, and my posts seemed not to go anywhere. Perhaps we’re over-saturated with the online world and this blog has lost its novelty. That’s OK. Nothing lasts forever. I still have some ideas, but I’ve written most of what I wanted to say. Well, the big things anyway.

The other reason, I think, is that I’ve become dismayed by the state of the world, and the U.S. in particular — the increasing frequency of climate disasters, the creeping authoritarianism, the growing political polarization, the disregard for truth, the uptick in right-wing extremism, the demonizing of immigrants, the damage done via the child separation policy, and the curtailing of refugees admitted (at a time when there are more displaced people in the world since World War 2). Anyway, this blog started to feel a bit futile in the big picture of a world that seems to be shedding compassion in favor of callousness, favoring insularity over connection.

Maybe that’s the wrong attitude. Last semester, I suggested an analogy to my class about velocity versus acceleration. When we’re traveling in a car at a constant speed, the movement is fairly imperceptible. It’s when there’s a change in speed or direction that motion becomes more noticeable to us. Applying that scenario, the current state of things would feel pretty good if, for example, we were just emerging from a war (at least in the U.S.). However, we seem to be accelerating in the wrong direction now. That shift doesn’t feel very good, but it’s important to hold the line and try to push the momentum back in the other direction. 

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Wisdom and Suffering

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

– Robert F. Kennedy citing Aeschylus on the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination

 

A few days ago the town manager of Billerica Massachusetts, John Curran, wrote a courageous essay about the online abuse he has received. Curran has a self-described “very rare and significant facial abnormality” known as hemifacial macrosomia, but he added that he had not been mocked for it for a very long time. That is, until the last few years.

Norms seem to have changed, he observed, where cruelty – particularly online, anonymous cruelty – has become more frequent. Curran also wrote that his childhood was not easy, and that he encountered a lot of adversity due to other children mocking him. However, he concluded on a positive note:    

It saddens me that I still have to deal with this from adults at 53 years old, but I would like to say to any young people that are different and happen to read this not to despair.

Your challenge will make you stronger, too, and you are better and wiser than anyone too ignorant to understand how to be civil and kind. Hang in there. It gets better.

Like Curran, I too think that kindness goes a long way. As a species, humans would not have gotten very far without it. And the notion that we are strengthened, not weakened, by our challenges in life is an interesting, though controversial, one.  

Borrowing a term from Nassim Taleb, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt likes to say that people are not just resilient, but “anti-fragile.” This is the idea that we don’t merely weather storms and adversities; rather, we grow from them, in terms of character and learning, as well as physiologically such as building aerobic capacity or muscle from repeated exercise. Haidt cites people like Friedrich Nietzsche (“that which does not kill me makes me stronger”) and Mencius about gaining strength through suffering, noting that:

“it’s not always true; there is PTSD. There are some things that can damage you, but for the most part it’s true… You cannot be a great man or woman unless you have suffered, faced adversity, been banged around, failed and come back, gotten back up fifty, a hundred, five hundred times. That’s the only way to greatness.”

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Sixteen Anti-War Songs

“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” — UNESCO

 

I made a list of sixteen anti-war songs that have meant something to me for a while, including a few lyrics from each and then a brief description. It would be too cumbersome to include all of the lyrics, or to make a comprehensive list, though you can find one here. Most are in English, so this will be limited in scope. I guess the songs are sort of “ranked,” but it’s not meant to be scientific; it’s just a list from which I find some meaning. Originally I sought to create a top ten list; however, it just kept growing.

Perhaps you have your own list, and it’s likely different than mine. We probably have different tastes, and that’s OK. I’m not going to fight anyone over anti-war songs. Maybe this list will do some a tiny bit of good, at a time when divisions appear to be growing.

 

 

16. Radiohead – “Harry Patch: In memory of” (2009)

Give your leaders each a gun and then let them
Fight it out themselves

 

This is Radiohead’s tribute to Harry Patch, the World War 1 veteran who died at age 111 in 2009. Patch once said that “War is organised murder and nothing else….politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.”

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