Too Little, Too Late…
Today I upgraded the theme software for this blog. I paid a nominal amount for some added features. Upon activating the new theme, I discovered the image for my header vanished. The gods or demons within what-we-have-created, the world wide web, again manifested their presence. Magic or superstition is that feeling of “mystery” in confrontation with phenomena I do not understand. My duty is not to yield to the feeling, but to have faith that what is real is rational, that I can and will solve the disappearing image problem. How robust is my faith in reason? In this, there is no difference at all between myself and every homo sapiens that has ever lived.
I have been thinking about the speech delivered by President Biden at Atlanta Georgia, about protecting voter rights. The precursor hoopla to the speech notwithstanding, and the colorful metaphors abundantly, rightfully used by the President,– I think the speech was too little too late. The Republican Party is confirmed in the practices of gerrymandering, voter suppression by restriction of voting by mail, and various other lawful measures to weight future elections in favor of conservative minded voters. Never mind this is a death knell for representative democracy. Members of the party are impervious to shame.
Here is a sample of the President’s language:
That’s why we’re here today to stand against the forces in America that value power over principle, forces that attempted a coup — a coup against the legally expressed will of the American people — by sowing doubt, inventing charges of fraud, and seeking to steal the 2020 election from the people…
Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion. It’s no longer about who gets to vote; it’s about making it harder to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all…
At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis ?
Today the New York Times reported, “Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, criticized President Biden for comparing politicians who oppose voting-rights legislation to Civil War Confederates.”
No more decisive proof can be offered than McConnell’s objection to the Presidents words, comparing Republican congressmen and women to the sedition of Confederates preferring war, than to liberating enslaved blacks. The President’s words are a precise description of our condition.
Back to Nature. The photo was captured earlier this morning. My grand daughter came into my work area to offer her greeting. She lives innocently, in a wondrous world, before having learned language. Language fragments, divides the fabric of the world, defining in terms of opposites: “cause” and “effect,” hot and cold, good and bad, right and wrong. The “and” connoting linkage, connection, is replaced with “or” indicating opposition, anti-thesis. Relationship, which is closer in meaning to our original pre-linguistic innocence, recedes in the rear view mirror for the adult. For many of my adult fellow citizens all that they can perceive is conflict, opposition, light or darkness.
Where is a philosopher of language when I need one? Who can I call? Noam Chomsky?
