Louisiana Gov Prefers Ten Commandments to the U.S. Constitution & RNC Edits Biden Videos to Lie to Public
Fake News Websites Set to Influence Elections, Trump's Underwhelming Reception at Black Church, New Feature Sharing Art, Honoring Donald Sutherland's Passing with a Song from the "M*A*S*H" Soundtrack
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Despite our friends and family, the journey of life is in essence traveled alone.
Louisiana Requires Ten Commandments to be Displayed in Every Public Classroom: This is how you distract voters from the fact that you’re doing nothing to address their serious economic and infrastructure problems.
Deluge of ‘pink slime’ websites threaten to drown out truth with fake news in US election: A democracy can only survive if the people value truth over bias.
‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead: Edited Biden video is used to mislead the public. Cancel your subscriptions now.
Kareem’s Video Break: Whenever she feels blue, this girl will be able to pull out this memory and feel better immediately.
Kellyanne Conway Massively Inflates Trump’s Church Crowd: In a desperate attempt to show us Trump has Black support, she instead shows she is incapable of truth or dignity.
Kareem Gets Artsy: I’m excited about introducing this new feature that shares artwork.
From M*A*S*H Soundtrack: “Suicide Is Painless”: In honor of Donald Sutherland’s passing, I’m featuring this parody song from the movie that made him famous.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.
G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), German philosopher
Philosophers are famous for complaining that they aren’t understood. For good reason. Trying to untangle a sentence about the nature of reality can cause headaches. When influential philosopher Hegel died, the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote that Hegel’s dying words were, “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.”
None of that background matters to me. I like the sentence because it gets to the heart of the nature of being alone in existence. No matter how many close friends and how much loving family we have, we are ultimately alone. When I contemplate my existence, I always think of the title of the 1959 short story by Alan Sillitoe (later made into a movie), “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” That’s how I see the essence of life: We all are on a long-distance run and we have to run the race alone, at our own pace, propelled by our own will.
Sometimes when I’m sitting among people, I get this feeling of floating outside my body and observing. “Who are these people?” I wonder. “What is that enormous body I’m attached to that has nothing to do with who I really am?”
We surround ourselves with people because we are social animals in need of company and the mental and physical stimulation. I used to watch this reality competition show in which a bunch of people trained in survival were placed in separate parts of the Alaskan wilderness where they had to live alone while building a shelter and hunting for food. The winner was whoever stayed the longest. What made most of them quit wasn’t the lack of food or the harshness of the environment, it was the isolation. They broke from loneliness.
I doubt that any of us truly feels understood by others. In part, that’s because we feel inadequate in expressing who we are. We’re inadequate because language doesn’t seem precise enough and also because we don’t fully know who we are. It’s like assembling a solid black jigsaw puzzle with all the edge pieces missing.
None of that bothers me. I like spending time thinking about who I really am, assembling the evidence like a detective, tacking up on a bulletin board the flotsam of my life, and attaching the yarn that ties things together. Looking for the pattern that explains everything. Yet, always comes up short.
What a fun and compelling mystery this quest to be understood can be.
Understand?