Abortion Bans Cause Killing Crisis & 5 U.S. Executions in One Week, Including One Clearly Innocent Man
Abortion Bans Cause Killing Crisis & 5 U.S. Executions in One Week, Including One Clearly Innocent Man
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Carl Jung encourages us to not go gentle into our later years.
‘One death is too many’: abortion bans usher in US maternal mortality crisis: Pregnant women are dying at a higher rate since Roe v. Wade was overturned. All while the GOP touts it’s protecting women.
5 executions have happened over a week’s span in the US. That’s the most in decades: The death penalty has become a political issue that separates the rational from the emotional.
Kareem’s Video Break: I guess if he can stick to his exercise routine, so can I.
Kareem’s Kvetching Korner: This familiar actor complains about how his morals cost him an acting job. This humblebrag doesn’t hold up.
No Comment Needed: Could YOU pass a citizenship test? Test your knowledge: Take this 10-question test to see if you know the basics about the U.S.
What I’m Watching: TV: Matlock and Moonflower Murders are entertaining mysteries with fun twists.
Benny Golson Plays “Along Came Betty, Part 1”: One of jazz’s most influential musicians plays his classic song.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning.
Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist (1875-1961)
Jung is bluntly warning us that while aging is a part of the process of life, it does not have to be a surrender to the inevitable decline of mind and body. Instead, it’s an opportunity to sharpen and refine the qualities you’ve learned over time. It’s too easy to buy into the cultural stereotypes of the elderly as cute but irrelevant, as hovering in the netherworld between doddering and wise, as cautionary props for the young, like park bench pigeons. As Rose belts in Gypsy:
Some people can be content
Playing bingo and paying rent
That's peachy for some people
For some humdrum people to be
But some people ain't me!
Nothing wrong with playing bingo or paying rent. But one’s joys in life shouldn’t be limited to the mundane routine just because we’re too lazy or too set in our ways to continue to strive to become smarter, stronger, and wiser. Sure, my life is much more sedentary now. My body refuses to join in pick-up games. It barely wants to pick up after itself. But I read every day, discover new things, watch documentaries, exercise, interact with friends, and write this newsletter as well as books. I do, therefore I am.
Most importantly, I don’t worry about how the world sees me (doddering? cute? Sure, why not?) and instead focus on how I want to see myself. “I am,” as John Donne wrote, “involved in mankind.” And to prove that growing and learning never stops, I’d change his inappropriate “mankind” to “humankind.”