Current events and the state of the world

It has been a very sad August when we allow the media to affect us.  Thousands of people dying unnecessarily, in war and conflict, in protests and on the streets, from Missouri to Gaza, from Kurdistan to Damascus, from Donetsk to Santiago, armies, states, police, brutally slaughter their perceived enemies. In Syria the latest count of deaths since the uprising begun has reached 170,000 people and with the ISIS the numbers are climbing.  In Gaza 2,100 is the last count in a few weeks.  In Ukraine it is questionable what the numbers are but lately different sides refer to 2,000.  In Africa the numbers are never so important to the western media to report, until the Ebola epidemic  came and the media took an interest as far as this epidemic may cause a threat elsewhere.  Yet there is one constant statistic that not many are reporting in the mass media.  Over 60,000 people a day, nearly half being children, are dying from the simple cause of the lack of nutrients and clean water.  Meanwhile if one is to divide the annual world production of corn (alone) by the population one will find the corn produced alone can prevent death from hunger.  An enormous amount of food is produced worldwide, maybe "too much" according to economists who are waged by corporations that benefit from the rise of the price of commodities.

Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power

Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power by Pat Duffy Hutcheon

My first and only personal encounter with Hannah Arendt was when she came to speak to the students at Yale University in 1968 while I was studying sociology there. As always, she was questioning the conventional wisdom of the times. At that time -- at the height of the Vietnam War crisis -- she stood solidly with the student protesters. Nevertheless, during that visit she sounded a warning against the popular obsession with unlimited "sovereignty" of either the individual or the collective, and with violence as a favored vehicle for both entities in their pursuit of social change. She let us know how much she deplored the glorification of violence by many students, and their glib talk -- from privileged and protected enclaves in the Western world -- of the "necessity" for violent revolution. For this she blamed what she saw as the malevolent influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon. She felt (rightly, I now believe) that these writers and other significant opinion setters among the young were then sowing the seeds for which the whole world would one day reap the whirlwind.