Category: Social Commentary

Manufactured Moral Panic: How critical race theory is weaponizing K-12 parents

With five-sixths of Americans never taking an American history course after high school, it is no wonder that this has been the normalized collective ethos in the United States that has created a blinding hegemonic national value system willing to omit anything from our sorted history that threatens American exceptionalism, and more to the point, that threatens the power and control of the White, Christian patriarchy. As a result, the U.S. has “the largest gap of any country in the world between what historians know and what the rest of us are taught.” Now there’s something to be proud of.

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The Myth of Going From A to Z

Creativity is not simply art; and logic is not simply math. Our lives, and solutions to our problems, do not start at A and move in a straight line to a blissful ‘Destination Z.’ In fact, if we try to move through life that way—forcing straight lines out of curves—we are merely living as static 2-D cardboard cutouts positioned in the extended-arm strain of a Steinholding competition. Relax. Take a sip. Germany has been wrong about some things.

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A Rainbow in the Rain

On the last lap, we were running in the rain. Laughing. She’s faster than me. The rain quickened her pace. I ran, momentarily alone, the windblown rain pelting my face, soaking my clothes, squinting my eyes, until they closed. Running blind. I didn’t want to open them. I wanted to keep running, looking up, blind, rain weighting my hair down, dripping off my nose and chin. Nature. Is. Bigger. Than. Us.

This is not an injustice. It is a surrender.

Free.

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The Angry Optimist

You can prepare and train as much as possible, but you can never be totally ready for the hardest things you aim to achieve, especially when it’s a path you’ve never taken. That’s when you put your default anger setting to good use.

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Crumbling from Within: How Confirmation Bias is Defeating America

Why is confirmation bias important? Because it can cause people to develop false beliefs, give more weight to information that supports their beliefs than is warranted by the evidence, and overlook or ignore evidence contrary to their beliefs. We see this at play day in and day out in all forms of our media consumption. The problem is, we can see other people’s biases, we just can’t see our own.

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One Open Eye: Seeing Saturn for the First Time

Everywhere we look in the universe, we are seeing reflections of ourselves. With one open eye, we are looking at where we came from and why we’re here. We are looking at our past and our future. Just as humankind across all origins, tones, ideals and cultures share love, hope, despair and fear, all the universe, including humankind, shares chemicals and evolution, existence and dying. The only thing that makes us different at all is that we exist now. It is our turn to be born, to live, to die, contributing to the only planet that has any life at all, so far, in the inconceivable vastness of the expanding universe. This is our chance, before we become just memories, and then just dust.

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