Tag: partisan politics
Binary Blindness
“Obviously, there is no such thing as race, and in many ways, sex is a continuum, not a binary. So it doesn’t make sense to label people in that way.” —Gloria Steinem I get to the airport 7 hours before departure in hopes of catching an earlier flight home. It’s a busy Friday so all flights are full. I’m stuck with the bleak prospect of surviving the whole day in a chaotic scene I deplore. Read More
Leading Change
In you have been wondering about what life might look like by the end of the 21st century, you may want to read a few of Ray Kurzweil’s books. Kurzweil, a pre-eminent futurist who graduated from MIT, formed multiple companies, and now works for Google as “Director of Engineering,” has shown that change is exploding exponentially, even though we cling to the belief that change is happening linearly.
Culture, Complicity, and Courage
“Noncooperation with evil is just as much a moral duty as is cooperation with good.” ―Martin Luther King Jr., The Radical King The problem is that Trump is not the biggest problem. The real problems are the culture that got Trump elected and the complicity that keeps him in office. I can only hope we can find the courage to change the culture and to challenge the dysfunctional systems that are manifesting negative energy in Read More
Factivists
I recently saw a simple and profound bumper sticker with just one word describing the driver’s orientation to life: FACTIVIST. I thought, now there’s a person I’d like to meet—an activist with command of the facts. In the last couple of weeks, I also read Stephen Pinker’s wonderful new book, Enlightenment Now and Jeremy Lent’s inspiring new book, The Patterning Instinct. Both of these books arm us with the facts we need to become more Read More
The Many Sides of Extremism
I just finished two books that shed new light on service and sacrifice and put them in perspective. The first, Strangers Drowning, discusses multiple examples of moral extremism; the second, When Breath Becomes Air, describes the experience of a 37-year-old Stanford neurosurgeon who died of cancer the year he finished his residency and was about to embark on a stellar career. In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar shares the stories of people who broke all norms and Read More