“Each time a man stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Robert Francis Kennedy
"Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance."
Václav Havel, Letter to Alexander Dubček, August 1969
The impulse to freedom and democracy always seems weak and hopeless when matched against the forces of oppression, because aggressive oppression is always more single-minded, having already crushed internal dissent and perspective, and is generally better organized and equipped.
And yet even the greatest tyrannies have fallen, always. This is because they carry within themselves the seeds of their own renewal and return to balance, or utter destruction.
As in most human things, their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness, and it is their inability to master and evolve that strength, to reform and achieve sustainability, that brings them crashing down, every time. Their strength is their weakness, in its overreach and self-absorption.
Faith, Unbelief, and Their Fundamentalisms
The Locus of Intolerance and the Objectification of the Other
I am sure that Hedges would agree that, as a person, he is subject to the same impulses, the same tendencies, the same foibles, the same snares of pride, harsher moments and failures to love, that he descries so capably in their more extreme manifestations of the abuse of faith and humanness.
I would have liked to have seen a little more expansion of the continuum of unbelief to include the uncertainty of agnosticism versus the certainty of atheism, for I believe that to be a fateful threshhold which one crosses with their own 'leap of faith' as it were, that being the difference between 'I do not know' and I am certain enough to declare and commit myself, whether it be for faith or for unbelief. - Jesse
At Their Extremes, Most Belief Systems Become Indistinguishable From their Putative Opposites
I noticed today that I have never posted a memoir which I had intended about Prague, and my time as a forty year old 'student' at a symposium there when I was taking my MBA in 1991, a period of great change. I shall have to do that sometime. I thought I had done so already.
It was particularly meaningful to me because this is where my father's grandfather had been from many years ago. And of course it is a city with a great tradition of learning, manufacturing, and engineering. And the 'hometown' of my great-grandfather, although all family traces seem to have been erased by time, and by the decisions of the great powers to hand the region over first to the Germans and then to the Soviets.
Coincidentally enough I am informed by readers via email that two organizations have blocked access to Le Café Américain of late: the government of mainland China, although I think that applies to all blogs and has been on and off for some time, and just recently Bank of America. Plus ça change, plus c'est la similar bureaucratic mentality.
Marta Kubišová, Modlitba pro Martu , 1968
'Prague Spring' 1968 - The 99 Percent
Let peace continue with this country.
Let wrath, envy, hate, fear and struggle vanish.
Now, when the lost reign over your affairs will return to you, people, it will return.
The cloud is slowly sailing away from the skies,
Everyone is reaping his own harvest.
Let my prayer speak to the hearts that are
Not burned by the times of bitterness like blooms by a late frost.
Let peace continue with this country.
Let wrath, envy, hate, fear and struggle vanish.
Now, when the lost reign over your affairs will return to you, people, it will return.
Let my prayer speak to the hearts that are
Not burned by the times of bitterness like blooms by a late frost.
Let peace continue with this country.
Let wrath, envy, hate, fear and struggle vanish.
Now, when the lost reign over your affairs will return to you, people, it will return.
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| Jan Palach Memorial, Wenceslas Square, Prague, 1989 |
