A corollary to this quote from 20th Century author and poet Charles Bukowski is: “It shouldn’t have to have happen to you for it to matter to you.”
FWIW, this is just another way of looking at the term “woke.” Decent people honestly care about the well-being of others.
When MLK said this in the 1960s, he was probably referring to war, specifically nuclear war.
In any case, it was a time when there was very little awareness that humankind was on course to ruin our planet’s environment and would soon suffer the extreme effects of global warming and the staggering loss of biodiversity. Just 60 years later, it is these conditions that threaten our very survival.
What happens when you combine British comedy with a disbelief in the supreme being? You get Ricky Gervais, who, as suggested at left, has a biting sense of humor.
Sadly, there is no mechanism by which this civilization can rethink the way it apportions wealth and power. As suggested at left, this is the reason for the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, not to mention the deterioration of our environment.
I recall asking a docent at the Getty Villa Museum that houses antiquities how it was possible that the people of ancient Greece both developed mathematics, philosophy, democracy , etc. and believed that the god Mercury pulled the sun across the sky is his chariot.
He explained, “The situation then was not all that dissimilar to that of today’s United States. Most of our scientists and urbanites are atheists, as were the people who lived in or near Athens. But go out into the rural areas where most people were farmers, where highly educated people are rare, and folks tend to be deeply religious.”
I don’t know anyone dumb enough to believe he has one.
FWIW, I’m still predicting that Trump is going to face legal consequences for trying to overthrow the U.S. government via a violent insurrection.
To answer the reader’s question at left: People have been talking about this since the dawn of the spoken word. The usual argument is that God gave us free will, which means that it’s up to us to choose one action over another, and some of these actions are evil.
In my way of thinking, this is specious; it’s like saying that the cleverest thing that Satan does is fooling us into believing that he doesn’t exist.
A reader notes about the meme here: Merry Christmas brings an awkward silence when I say it. Oh well, too bad. The holiday IS Christmas.
Here’s another way of defining “woke,” i.e., feeling the pain of others.
