I’ve been thinking a lot about language and how words work together to form meaning.
Rich got me started on it – at least, this week. The idea that I – that anyone – can distill something so profound and so vast in just a few words, and that those words can resonate beyond our own selves, is one of the things that propels me through my personal and professional worlds.
Communication is vital to our existence as human beings, and we’re constantly trying to make those critical connections. When I encounter beautiful language that fits, I’m inspired. When I hit just the right note (and that’s not nearly as often as I’d like), I’m thrilled (and often, more than a little surprised).
I’ve been thinking about offering up a semi-regular theme here; Thoughts for Thursday – where I’ll post quotes and passages that inspire me. My email address is over there on the sidebar; if there’s something you want to see here, please give me a head’s up.
I’m hoping to inspire a discourse in the comments – what do these words mean to you? What other ideas or quotes do they call to your mind? How do these words fit into your life or your understanding of how the world works?
I’m going to start this conversation with this quote. It’s a line from Albert Speer’s closing statement to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal and, given where it seems our government sees fit to take us, I think this quote is particularly relevant.
…the more technical the world becomes, the more necessary is the promotion of individual freedom and the individual’s awareness of himself as a counterbalance.
This is going to sound off topic, but it really isn’t. I am very against abortion from a moral standpoint. However, I am not in favor of making abortion illegal. Your quote’s mention of the individual as counterbalance helped me form the explanation in my mind.
A government that can pass laws forcing you to carry a pregnancy to term, is the same government that can pass laws forcing you not to carry a pregnancy to term. The individual must be the counterbalance in the face of technology.
Seems to me that more technology we have, the more laws we have regulating that technology and the whole concept of free will is not even an option anymore.
As one commenter on that other blog stated, this puts us at the “top of the slipperiest f*cking slope there is”.
Where’s our urge to protest?
The slope is slippery and the quote was very interesting..the UK seems intent on shutting down individual freedoms at the moment…
We do not protest because we are not hungry and are dazzled by the technology. I am the first to admit that I thought Google street view was pretty darn cool, until my house showed up on it.
The problem is that a lot of people don’t have much of an awareness of themselves. If they truly did, I think the world would be a much nicer place.
Seester, this is exactly the point I try to make with my kids when I do the free vs. ethical speech lesson. I will fight to the death for some idiot’s right to spew his nonsense because to deny him that right threatens MY right to express myself. My hero, Desmond Tutu, was on to something when he said “none are free unless all are free.”
Mike, I got into that brain-fuck when I started a conversation about gun control after the VT massacre. While I understand that more regulation isn’t the answer many of our problems, I’m not quite smart enough to come up with a way to deal with stuff WITHOUT more rules.
Three things, Jennifer – one, it’s PERFECTLY okay to swear on my blog. Given the right conditions, I can swear like a drunken longshoreman; I have no need of the asterisks…
Two, I believe the person who left that comment is Bo, the owner of the blog. This man can THINK, and that, combined with his wicked sense of funny, makes me adore him.
Three, I have no IDEA where our urge to protest is. I was JUST talking to my college’s president about that today, as a matter of fact. I was talking to him about this speech (he dropped into my class after I taught the Speer speech from which I took that quote) and I was relating to him the story about the Trinidad check-points and wondering why we seem so willing to just roll over. I came off as VERY lefty, but did I care one little bit about that? No; no, I did not. I’m afraid of how much farther the proverbial pendulum has to swing before we are jolted out of our complacency..
Rosie, I bet they’re doing it under the guise of protection, too, right? I think it was Benjamin Franklin who warned us that “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.”
Seester, I think you’re on to something here. Though I’m not a crazy Mountain Man survivalist, I also refuse to get a speed pass for highway tolls. Even though I have nothing to hide, I really don’t WANT anyone to have the ability to track my movements that easily.
Did I ever tell you guys about my freshmen? I was doing a unit on Holocaust literature, and one of the kids asked me (as they always do) how something so horrible could be allowed to happen. I explained that it happens in pieces, bit by innocent-seeming bit, until the state has that kind of terrible control. Then I brought up the warrentless wiretapping story that had just broken a week or two before. “Who cares?” my students said, “LET them listen to my phone calls – I have nothing to hide.” REALLY?!! Go watch Enemy of the State, then get back to me on that.
Auntie, I’m not sure I understand what you mean here – could you ’splain, please?
Shucks. Thanks, Chili. Mad love. You know that.
Most any truly serious worry I do tends to concern my immediate family and friends. That’s human and expected. But when I think about society at large, this is at the top of the list.
The deeply depressing thing about it is that really, it’s over. We have lost.
Nevertheless, screaming about it is free (for now, he said ominously), so I do so. But as Robin Williams once said in another context, it’s like handling nuclear waste with an oven mitt.
It’s not even that no one cares; no, it’s deeper than that. It’s that no one even realizes in the first place that personal liberty is perhaps the single greatest societal construct. It’s not just concern that’s absent; it’s the very framework for concern that’s absent.
Those who retain said framework and concern are pissing into a hurricane.
I’m big on privacy. I feel that my life should be given out in small chunks that I give in conversation, not that I distribute over forms and applications and websites. Unfortunately, the world is now shaped like this and we sorta just…go with it. It’s the path of least resistance.
I think that it would be more ethical to remove ourselves from the framework that has been constructed that takes away from personal liberty, i.e., giving up personal info, having and ID system, having laws that encroach on privacy and liberty. It is possible to do that, I think, but there is a necessity for such things. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. Why have things become the way they are if someone hadn’t at first, very very first, decided that we needed them somewhere. The why almost doesn’t matter. Like you said, it happens in pieces. One person’s “why for” is another person’s restriction.