Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.
Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.
But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.
We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.
In tracking down and eliminating terrorists , we need to change our metaphor from a "war on terror" exactly what, pray tell, is that? to the mind-set of Interpol tracking down master criminals through intense global cooperation among nations, or the FBI stalking the Mafia , or local police determined to quell street gangs without leveling the entire neighborhood in the process.
The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral. "
Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.
When did having a life become an event you had to schedule?
When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right. ’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it. ’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights.
Abolish all taxation save that upon land values.
Knowing that one may be subject to bias is one thing; being able to correct it is another.