"It Does Not Have To Be Like This."

I do love aspects of the internet. And despise others. Everything is pretty much a keystroke away. So much information & disinformation. I do think we are totally swamped with information. And our little brains can only process so much info at one time. Things get jumbled, confusing.

I think it is important to search out the good, real, & true. Search for reliable sources and voices of reason & justice. Anyway, once in awhile I come across something fantastically good essential, true, inspiring.

For instance this "Cultural Comment" from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the New Yorker. Read the whole thing. Beautifully written. And essential to the health of our bodies, minds and souls.

"It does not have to be like this..."

"America has always been aspirational to me. Even when I chafed at its hypocrisies, it somehow always seemed sure, a nation that knew what it was doing, refreshingly free of that anything-can-happen existential uncertainty so familiar to developing nations. But no longer. The election of Donald Trump has flattened the poetry in America’s founding philosophy: the country born from an idea of freedom is to be governed by an unstable, stubbornly uninformed, authoritarian demagogue. And in response to this there are people living in visceral fear, people anxiously trying to discern policy from bluster, and people kowtowing as though to a new king. Things that were recently pushed to the corners of America’s political space—overt racism, glaring misogyny, anti-intellectualism—are once again creeping to the center.

Now is the time to counter lies with facts, repeatedly and unflaggingly, while also proclaiming the greater truths: of our equal humanity, of decency, of compassion. Every precious ideal must be reiterated, every obvious argument made, because an ugly idea left unchallenged begins to turn the color of normal. It does not have to be like this." - CNA