Op-Ed
Glasses up for those French workers and Middle-Class people that are trying to save Western Civilization and its liberal democracy!
In many other parts of the Western world, not so much in the Global South, for some people you are being classified as spoiled brats that want to retire at the tender age of 62. Some of these people criticizing the French workers and their allies have spent their whole lives getting kicked in the ass and can’t understand living any other way.
These are the same people that stay silent when children and adults are getting killed daily by gun shots in the USA. According to ABC News’ Kiara Alfonseca, so far in 2023, 9,870 people have died from gun violence in the U.S, as of March 27, according to the Gun Violence Archive – which is an average of more than 114 deaths each day.
Our people have been so accustomed to get kicked in their behind that sadly they don’t seem to understand to live any other way. Here in Florida now it will be legal to carry guns with you without the need of licenses, permits or any proof that you know how to use a firearm.
“Chief Drake said it was too early to discuss a possible motive for the shooting, though he confirmed that the attack was targeted. The authorities were reviewing writings, and had made contact with the shooter’s father. . . .”
Yeah, they’ll figure it out.
The latest mass shooting: Six people dead, including three 9-year-old children, at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. The alleged shooter, age 28 – a former student at Covenant – stomped into the school on March 27 carrying (God bless America) two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun. He/she, apparently transgender, was eventually shot dead by police.
In other news . . .
This is from one of the people I’m least likely to bother quoting:
“We need a national divorce. . . From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrats’ traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”
The words are those of our fellow American, Marjorie Taylor Greene, sputtering unhinged right-wing comedy for all the country to hear. The point she’s making, of course, is anything but unique. The right-wing chorus of snarling contempt is everywhere, focused essentially on a single word, which is the darling enemy of the moment: Woke.
The high-profile and sudden failure of Silicon Valley Bank, which hid huge losses from its depositors, investors, and regulators, highlights the dangers of corporate fraud for our financial system. It confirms the kind of problems highlighted by a recent study published in the Journal of Financial Economics estimating that only one-third of corporate frauds are detected, with an average of 10% of large publicly traded firms committing securities fraud every year. This means that the true extent of corporate fraud is much larger than what is currently being reported. The study also estimates that corporate fraud destroys 1.6% of equity value each year, which equals to $830 billion in 2021.
The future tapped me quietly on the shoulder the other day and suggested that I take a moment to learn about the writing bots.
They’re coming!
Excuse me, they’re here. And they struck me as alien invaders, this recent manifestation of artificial intelligence on the Internet, which college students, high school students — anybody — can download, feed a topic and get it to write an essay for them. Is this technology’s next step, after Roomba the robot vacuum cleaner? Humanity is relieved of one more odious task — writing stuff.
Confession: I have a few books out there that no one knows about because I haven’t written them . . . well, finished them.
I’ve talked in previous columns about “wrestling with infinity” — the match I always lose — by which I mean, picking a subject too large to reduce to words and eventually getting hopelessly lost in it, e.g.: shifting human consciousness, transcending what we think we know, truly creating peace (whatever that is).
So welcome to my latest attempt to circumvent infinity. The book I’m aiming at is a collection of the poetry I’ve written over the past two decades, but not exactly. It’s not really a “collection” of anything — art objects on display in glass cases, meant to be admired — and the poetry (and other stuff) I would include I think of essentially as “soul fragments”: bleeding pieces of personal truth.
And the point of the book is to enter the present moment with the reader, to revere life together, to tremble at its wonder, to look into the eyes the unknown . . . with the help of something I call the Blue Pearl.
A week from today the Florida Democratic Party is going to choose its new Chair. A few years ago, Florida like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania was considered a purple state. No more.
What caused Florida’s deviation? Faulty Democratic Party leadership. Like it or not to counteract the abundant right-wing forces that make Florida their home, the main force of opposition is the State’s Democratic Party. But what hindered the Democratic Party from being a force to counteract the rapidly increasing rightwing volume of the Republican Party? Very simple, the Florida Democratic Party failed to distinguish itself politically from a Republican Party that every day gives thinking Floridians a view of what Fascism would look like.
The governor of the State, Ron DeSantis, who has presidential ambitions is using Florida as a laboratory to promote his Fascist ideas, and the Democratic Party, instead of focusing in combating those ideas it engaged in a coco maniac battle with the Republican Party meant to show Floridians that they are more anti-socialist than the Republicans, as if many people cared.
No doubt everyone grows old in their own way.
But once you actually hit it — that three letter word, “old” — watch out: “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick . . .”
So wrote William Butler Yeats, back in the last century, conjuring a mystical journey to the spiritual city of Byzantium in order to escape his entrapment in that word, and in the world that values only youth. Hey Bill, how does it feel to be so old?
Curse that First Amendment! What were the Founding Fathers thinking?
As Ron DeSantis has declared and legislated, the safety of Florida — and, yeah, the safety of the nation — isn’t a matter of gun control (or police control) but speech control, especially in public-school classrooms and libraries, where the innocent minds of our children are developing.