It’s a Vast Oversimplification…
. . . but let’s entertain it for a moment: there are roughly two kinds of people in the world:
- Those who are interested in power, money, and glory; and
- those who are interested in something else.
Of course there is some apparent overlap, because plenty of people who are interested in, say, making scientific discoveries or writing novels, would like to get some glory, money, and power for it. But you’ll find that those also divide along the same lines: those who are primarily interested in the glory, money, etc., and those who are principally interested in what they’re doing and know that some power/money/glory will free them to do and share more of it. The latter tend to have a sense of “enough.” The absence of that sensor is an identifying characteristic of the former.
The first group of people is much smaller, but has in its favor
- motivation, and
- the command of material resources and the labor and “loyalty” of others. (Scare quotes because it’s the stomach kind, not the heart kind.)
The second group of people is much larger, and that’s all it has in its favor: numbers. But it’s very hard to rally those numbers, because these people are interested in a million different things and just want to be left alone to pursue them.
But the first group will not leave them alone.
Oh, one other thing the second group has in its favor: evolution. Their interests are infinitely more conducive to the long-term survival of our species, if not to its short-term bang-pow-dazzle success.
Mom Sounds Off
on the post-election mood—9 days before her 97th birthday.
Hey, Annie! What doing? Got an Election Hangover? Are you – as I am – a MishMash of emotional Cross-currents: a schemear of elation, exhaustion, anxiety spread across my breakfast pumpernickel? Am I afraid that sulking Trump will hang in the air over us like a noxious fart? Are we doomed to suffer his indelible presence because he will intone neither the magic release: “I quit”, nor choke to death on the fatal promise, “NEVER!”?
🍷♥️
Sent from my iPhone
She’s like the nonagenarian Rachel Maddow.
Why capitalize “white”?
The Washington Post does it, and it drives me crazy.
Why? Why kowtow to the belief of white nationalists such as VDARE that “White” is an identity, a people?
Suppose it were an identity, what would define it? World domination?
European culture, you say? That’s pretty funny considering that European peoples fought each other tooth and nail from prehistory up through 1945 (and didn’t stop then). Here’s a list of European wars, starting only in 1112 BC. I literally don’t have the time to count them. You’ll be amazed.
You may argue, with reason, that Black people too descend from many diverse peoples and cultures—some of whom unquestionably fought each other as well. African people would have been harder to enslave had local enemies not captured and sold one another. Where there is a buyer, sellers appear. Europeans exploited traditional rivalries among Native Americans in similar ways.
Conflict and bids for dominance are a proud and shameful part of our common “human potential” (“one in 200 men are direct descendants of Genghis Khan“), but it’s a part that Europeans magnified to an unprecedented global scale, with a fevered drive to expand and exploit, more-advanced technologies for doing so, and a conviction of entitlement based on divinely bestowed superiority. In 2020, you still wanna base an identity on that? Basically, on “might makes right”?
Technology is only one field of achievement, the one that confers material power and enables its possessors, if so inclined, to overwhelm, expropriate, and even obliterate other peoples’ achievements. It’s far from Europeans’ only achievement, but technology of one kind—the technology of extraction, manufacture, and domination—is the only one in which they were inarguably superior. Technology has its wonders, but it’s a two-edged sword that eventually wounds its wielder. It makes life both better and worse. The balance sheet is a work in progress.
Ironically, “Black” is an identity Black people didn’t ask for. It was welded together out of diverse materials—genetic, linguistic, cultural—by slavery, discrimination, and a disdainful lack of discrimination in the other sense. Just as white police and passersby often can’t tell Black people apart, slave traders and owners couldn’t tell Black peoples apart—didn’t bother to.
But that capital letter is earned. It’s recognition and reparation. It’s Black Lives Matter in one letter. White people, meanwhile, need to retire from their implicit capital letter. What bad timing to make it explicit just as growing numbers are growing sick, really sick, of having the world on their shoulders and their knee on its neck. White people need to explore the freedom of being generic, of losing themselves in the crowd, of being among, not above. Capitalizing their name, meanwhile, is not placing Black people above white people. It’s shining a light.
Maybe a day will come when we can see and speak to each other as individuals with a whole palette of skin tones and a whole panoply of ancestries and influences. We’re just not there yet, but it’s a good place to be going.
Ambiance 