100 Days of Gratitude: Day 1
Inspired by local healers/artists, working with Peace Studies students (I'm going to suggest today that they do this), and one person close to me that has challenged me to reflect and grow, I am going to practice a 100 days of conscious gratitude to develop a stronger sense of what I find meaningful in the world and to realize how fortunate I am.
Day 1: Books
I cannot overstate the importance of books in my life. From the earliest age they opened up a vast world of wonders for a shy, awkward, sensitive kid. They have been with me when I felt despair or loneliness. They have pushed me down roads less traveled and given me reasons to think differently and get out into the world to work for change. They also have provided a historical/future/transcultural dialogue that often plays out in my mind and my dreams as actual conversations with the authors (it should be noted I write in books and actively dialogue with them). I remember as a young working class kid laboring away at some difficult physical job I would daydream about what it would be like to have a job where I could read for a living. It seemed like an impossible dream at the time for a 10th grade dropout ... I often wonder with David Byrne "how did I get here" as a Humanities professor who is paid to read and talk about it. My reading has transformed in the 21st Century, but books still serve a central part of my continuing education and they continue to inspire me to explore more of the outside world/cultures/peoples.
Chris Hedges: Journalist/Presbyterian Minister/Former War Correspondent/African-American Studies/Christian Anarchist Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)
Griffin, Farah Jasmine and Mark Anthony Neal. "Respect: A Tribute to Aretha Franklin, an Icon of the Civil Rights & Feminist Movements." Democracy Now (August 17, 2018) ["Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, died Thursday at her home in Detroit at the age of 76. For decades, Aretha Franklin has been celebrated as one of the greatest American singers of any genre, who helped give birth to soul and redefined the American musical tradition. In 1987, Aretha Franklin became the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She held the record for the most songs on the Billboard Top 100 for 40 years. Rolling Stone ranked her the greatest singer of all time on its top 100 list, calling her “a gift from God.” Her hit single “Respect” became part of the soundtrack to the civil rights movement, which she also supported behind the scenes. We speak with professors Mark Anthony Neal of Duke University and Farah Jasmine Griffin of Columbia University." Part two: "Angela Davis: Aretha Franklin Offered to Post Bail for Me, Saying “Black People Will Be Free.”" and Part three: "Angela Davis: Aretha Franklin “Will Forever Animate Our Collective Sense of Desire for Change.”"]
Hedemann, Ed and Jeremy Scahill. "In Memoriam: David McReynolds, the Gay Socialist Pacifist Who Twice Ran for President, Dies at 88." Democracy Now (August 20, 2018) ["Longtime pacifist and socialist David McReynolds died Friday at the age of 88. Known to historian Howard Zinn and many others as a “hero of the antiwar movement,” McReynolds was a staff member with the War Resisters League from 1960 to 1999. There, he focused on counter-recruitment and helped organize one of the first draft card burnings. He went on to play a key role in some of major demonstrations against the Vietnam War and campaign for nuclear disarmament. McReynolds ran for president in 1980 and 2000 as an openly gay man. For more, we speak with two of his close friends. Ed Hedemann worked with McReynolds for decades at the War Resisters League. Jeremy Scahill is an investigative journalist and co-founder of The Intercept." Part two: "Friends Remember War Resisters League Activist & Socialist David McReynolds, Long Targeted by FBI."]
Onderchanin, Stephanie and Duncan Tarr. "How the National Prison Strike Is Working to Help Incarcerated People in the United States." Teen Vogue (August 21, 2018)
Pekron, Rebecca. "On Arthur Rimbaud." Entitled Opinions (June 8, 2016) ["I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic. I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still."
"A thousand Dreams within me softly burn: From time to time my heart is like some oak Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn." -- Arthur Rimbaud]
Riley, Boots. "On Sorry to Bother You and Communism." The Dig (August 9, 2018) ["Sorry to Bother You is a hilarious film about the dead serious shitiness of life under neoliberalism's flexibilized and precarious labor regime, a system teetering upon a thin line between free labor exploitation and a form of expropriation reminiscent of full-on slave labor—all at the mercy of the thinly-veiled barbarity of Palo Alto-style techno-utopianism. It's about how capitalist society divides and conquers friends and family to claim not only our obedience but also our very souls, and about how the task of left organizing is to see through that game and fight together. Dan's guest today is Boots Riley, who wrote and directed the film and also fronts the left-wing hip hop group The Coup."]
Wheeler, Marcy. "Michael Cohen Pleads Guilty & Implicates Trump as Paul Manafort Is Convicted. Is Impeachment Next?" Democracy Now (August 22, 2018) ["Talk of the possible impeachment of President Trump is growing in Washington after Tuesday’s stunning legal developments. In New York, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges, including tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations. Two hundred miles away, in Virginia, Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort was found guilty of eight charges related to tax fraud and bank fraud. The Cohen case is likely to put the president in the most legal jeopardy. Cohen, who worked for Trump from 2006 until this year, admitted in court that he arranged to illegally pay out money to two women—an adult film star and a Playboy model—to keep them from speaking during the 2016 campaign about their affairs with Donald Trump. Cohen said the payments were made “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office” and that they were made “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis wrote on Twitter, “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?” We speak with Marcy Wheeler, an independent journalist who covers national security and civil liberties."]
100 days of gratitude - Day 2 Difference
I am grateful that my world and society is so diverse and I celebrate the many different beings and things that remind me of that wonder. I feel sorry for those that fear this difference, those that find it a threat. I would never want to live in a world where people all look like I do, think like I do or believe what I do. A founding statement that has always guided me is the Russian thinker/writer Mikhail Bakhtin when he states in the book: Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. trans. C. Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984:
Everything that pertains to me enters my consciousness, beginning with my name, from the external world through the mouths of others (my mother, and so forth), with their intonation, in their emotional and value-assigning tonality. I realize myself initially through others: from them I receive words, forms, and tonalities for the formation of my initial idea of myself. … Just as the body is formed initially in the mother’s womb, a person’s consciousness awakens wrapped in another’s consciousness. (xx)
Truth is not born nor is it found inside the head of an individual person; it is born between people collectively searching for the truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. (110)
I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a thou) … The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communion. To be means to communicate … To be means to be for another, and through the other for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another … I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without another. (287)
Monologism at its extreme denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monologic approach…another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. No response is expected from it that could change everything in the world of my consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons. (Bakhtin: 292-93)
The dialogic nature of consciousness. The dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open- ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium. (Bakhtin: 293)
I seek to engage in a conversation with (speaking with and thinking with) the differences I encounter daily. To not be mindlessly afraid of what is different from me. To appreciate/understand the uniqueness of everything/everyone. I do not seek difference for difference's sake (when the cultivation of difference becomes another form of rout conformity and silencing of difference - when alternative becomes just another consumer fashion or how subcultures police the interests/expression of their adherents), instead it is the expression of authentic identity that produces something special and allows for others to do the same.
Meditating in my backyard this morning I was gazing at the back of my fence where there is a collection of purple flowers and I noticed one in the middle of them growing from the same vine that was completely different, kind of an albino mutation that lacked the purple of the others, but had its own special beauty. I gazed upon it in wonder and thought on how did this special little flower come to be. An accident of nature or something else - who knows, it not only shined in uniqueness, it also brought into focus the beauty of all of the flowers. The contrast, the difference, enhances them all.
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