It's a big job. Being informed, trying to make yourself an intelligence-seeking entity. And the Human Story is complicated, often contradictory & completely messy. It is probably a life-long quest: to try to understand what the fuck happened? Reading and thinking is your best tool to pursue this kind of understanding. There is a unchained river, an enormous always growing & peaking mountain of books to read. You can never get to them all in a mere lifetime. So all your "understanding" will be paltry and partial. When confronted with the thorniest questions, you will often find yourself saying, "I don't rightly know."
You can listen to intelligent folks, seek them out, read and ponder. Best to assume you don't know jack-shit.You need to smarten up your self. You want simple answers to complicated questions, but that's not really how it works.
Intelligence. You can give it go. I came across this amazing post from Teri Kanefield, a smart, learned thinker and writer, she asks "Can Democracy Survive in America?" It's a bold, provocative, loaded, & potent question. And the answer covers lots of territory. In order to answer the question, or even to make the attempt, you need to know lots of shite about lots of shite. And you need to give a shit. You need to pay attention, to think about what went down long before, and explore how and why we find ourselves in this particular moment, right now.
So, yeah, if you don't want to be a complete fool & dolt, please do live in the moment, but swim in the history of the world too. You gotta work at it. As Ringo Starr once said in a song, "It Don't Come Easy." Get your shit together. "Feed your head." Get smart. Read. Think.
January 16, 2023 - Martin Luther King Jr day - "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Amen, brother...
