Tag Archives: Kindness

Art, Humanity, Philosophy, Reason

This is It

img_3168This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That.  – James Broughton

These are conflicted times.  It’s easy to lose ourselves in the maze of social and mainstream media, to become disoriented by the barrage of information and confusing or unsettling news that inundates us at ever turn.  What’s real? What isn’t?  What’s truth? What’s lies? Where’s our place in the overall scheme of things?  And maybe “Why is this happening to us?” – whatever “this” might be.

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Culture, Humanity, Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Race, Social Justice, Society

Pass the Mic

How do we empower the people we call the voiceless?  Pass the mic.
 – Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, editor-in-chief of MuslimGirl.com, June 2016  panel at the White House’s United State of Women Summit

An editorial cultural-appropriationpiece by Lionel Shriver caught my eye in the Tampa Bay Times this morning.  Not familiar with Shriver’s work or immediately with the context of her situation as a keynote speaker at the Brisbane Writers Festival, the editorial puzzled me.

“Briefly, ” she wrote, “my address maintained that fiction writers should be allowed to write fiction — thus should not let concerns about “cultural appropriation” constrain our creation of characters from different backgrounds than our own. I defended fiction as a vital vehicle for empathy. If we have permission to write only about our own personal experience, there is no fiction, but only memoir. Honestly, my thesis seemed so self-evident that I’d worried the speech would be bland.”

As a writer and an avid reader, the topic interested me, and at first I couldn’t see what the issue was. Of course readers have to speak in other voices, and sometimes from the perspective of people different from themselves.  Without the ability to do that, we wouldn’t have Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird.   Right?

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Compassion, Culture, Humanity, Kindness, Politics, Reason, Social Justice, Society

Played for Fools

cognitive-bias-chartI’m well aware that we have a very human tendency to think we’re being open minded when we’re mostly supporting our own existing world views.  Buster Bensen did a great piece on the issue of cognitive bias over on Better Humans recently and even provided a handy “cheat sheet” for improved self-awareness.

But even with my bias chart at hand to help dt5me approach the current political landscape with a truly open mind, I don’t see any other way to view the current Republican candidate as anything but an immature, manipulative,  narcissistic bully unfit to shine the shoes of any American, let alone function as the leader of our democratic republic.

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