Op-Ed
Close your eyes and try to envision the two wolves.
Imagine yourself as a terrified child. I think that helps bring the myth to life . . . this myth, said to be Cherokee, of humanity’s two choices. The wolves are engaged in a vicious fight.
The wise grandfather explains to the child that the two wolves are inside all of us. One of the wolves is an arrogant narcissist — a jerk, an egocentric idiot. You know, evil. The other is the embodiment of joy and empathy, kindness and love.
The trembling child asks in alarm: “Which one wins?”
And Grandfather lays it on the line: “The one you feed.”
In 2022, Pride month — June — gave way to an explosion of invective against LGBTQ rights, helped along by allies in right-wing media, particularly Fox News. But there’s also rising anti-trans sentiment in the liberal-left sphere, and it’s being driven by some elements of what might be called the “post-left,” onetime champions of progressive outlooks who have now tilted to the right. Former Intercept writer) Glenn Greenwald is one of those leading the charge, turning his audience on to fringe elements of a growing hate movement.
It wasn’t always like this. Greenwald was once a stalwart defender of trans rights — perhaps in connection with his advocacy for U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning and his friendship with since-assassinated Brazilian politician and activist Marielle Franco. “If you want to get a taste for how widespread warped & creepy hostility against trans people is, mention Chelsea Manning & survey the bile,” Greenwald tweeted on Sept. 10, 2016.
Why does the United States have more civilian gun deaths then the entire rest of the world combined? Is it because people in the US are more violent? NO.
Is it because people in the US are more unstable, have more mental problems, and we have more sociopaths? NO.
Is it because more people in the US are mean, vicious, deadly? NO.
There is only one thing that the US has more of than any other country – guns. Easy and simple. We have more guns, a lot more guns, and far more deadly guns. And they are often easily attainable and accessible.
Texas and Arizona have begun busing refugees at their border – at a cost of millions – up to a couple liberal Northern cities . . . let’s see how they like it!
Texas, according to Gov. Greg Abbott, “has had to take unprecedented action to keep our communities safe” – you know, from the hordes of rapists or whatever storming across America’s insecure border, which of course is 100 percent the fault of President Joe Biden.
On a shrugged-off afternoon of YouTube wandering, I came upon this: “Is There Life After Death?”
Hmmm . . . well, is there?
Turns out it was a presentation by five professors at the University of Virginia, moderated, good God, by John Cleese. I more or less had no choice but to click the link and listen — and doing so pushed me into places I’d never been before, into a universe of questions and wonder. This wasn’t so much because I learned anything new. It was because these profs, who belonged to the university’s Division of Perceptual Studies, were neuroscientists groping to understand the nature of consciousness beyond the physical realm.
Perhaps consciousness isn’t sheerly a manifestation — a side effect — of the brain’s physical functioning. Could “something” exist beyond the brain? If so, what?
If you depart from an "us vs. them" philosophy of life, your first confrontation is likely to be with the cynics.
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was how deeply and intensely people wanted to be listened to.
Last week, for instance, I wrote about the weekend I spent, a decade ago, getting handgun training from the NRA—and what I learned, which is that the things you need to fear are endless, and when one of them pops up in your life you'd better be prepared to kill it. One reader said he wondered "if Robert has ever truly felt as though his life or those he values were threatened" and quickly answered his own question: Of course not! And then he crooned, oh so tenderly: "Must be nice for Robert to live in such an insulated bubble."
Issue solved! Everyone needs a gun, except for the utterly naïve.
If I'd had a gun, I may have taken aim at this snarky fool, but eventually I started calming down and thinking about his words—this monkey wrench of cynicism, as I called it—with slightly more positive energy.
In a blog entry, reflecting on the G20 Foreign Ministers' meeting in Bali, Indonesia, on 7-8 July, the High Representative of the European Union, Josep Borrell, seems to have accepted the painful truth that the West is losing what he termed "the global battle of narratives".
"The global battle of narratives is in full swing and, for now, we are not winning," Borrell admitted. The solution: "As the EU, we have to engage further to refute Russian lies and war propaganda," the EU's top diplomat added.
Borrell's piece is a testimony to the very erroneous logic that led to the so-called 'battle of narratives' to be lost in the first place.
Is an insurrection percolating in the MAGA universe? A civil war?
One thing I notice as I read the growing warnings that this is the case is the assumption that suddenly the USA has become a divided nation, a splintered democracy, when, in point of fact, it has always been deeply – and for much of its history, good God, legally – divided.
Indeed, Jim Crow America was the prime model for a certain would-be European dictator.
You may have heard of Adolf Hitler. In Mein Kampf, the biography he wrote before he came to power, he “praises America,” according to Alex Ross, writing in the New Yorker, “as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship,”
WASHINGTON -
Declaring that “President Biden has been neither bold nor inspiring” and “his prospects for winning re-election appear to be bleak,” the national activist organization RootsAction announced today that it will launch a campaign to prevent his renomination.
With an email list of 1.2 million current supporters in the United States, RootsAction issued a statement saying it is committed to nationwide organizing to prevent Biden from being the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee for president. This is the first time that a large national organization has announced such plans.
“In 2024 the United States will face the dual imperatives of preventing a Republican takeover of the White House and advancing a truly progressive agenda,” RootsAction said in a statement. With so much at stake, renominating Biden “would be a tragic mistake.” The statement concluded: “A president is not his party’s king, and he has no automatic right to renomination. Joe Biden should not seek it. If he does, he will have a fight on his hands.”
The full RootsAction statement announcing the #DontRunJoe campaign is posted at DontRunJoe.org.
(Dedicated to the memory of Ghassan Kanafani, an iconic Palestinian leader and engaged intellectual who was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad on July 8, 1972)
Years before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, US media introduced many new characters, promoting them as ‘experts’ who helped ratchet up US propaganda, ultimately allowing the US government to secure enough popular support for the war.