Trump Said the Severely Disabled "Should Just Die" & DeSantis Rejects $250 Million to Feed Children
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: What’s the difference between knowledge and wisdom?
My Uncle Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans Like My Son ‘Should Just Die’: Trump builds a wall—between himself and our values.
Ron DeSantis’s rejection of federal aid left children hungry, advocates say: Whatever happened to that kid that nobody liked because he had no human feelings? Oh, he became the governor of Florida.
Vets Group Calls BS on GOP Attacks of Tim Walz’s Military Service: How desperate do they have to be to avoid the real issues so they can focus on this?
Kareem’s Video Break: This is the kind of homecoming we all need.
As Hundreds of Churches Sit Empty, Some Become Hotels and Restaurants: The bright side is that people are free to form communities based on shared values, not just dogma and ritual.
Texas: judge rules against Black high school teen in hair discrimination case: This case is more about forcing unnecessary conformity and bowing to authority.
Tony Bennett & Count Basie Perform “Don't Get Around Much Anymore”: This is why this song is a jazz classic.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our place with book markers
That measure what we've lost
Simon & Garfunkel, “The Dangling Conversation”
In my last newsletter, my jukebox playlist featured “The Dangling Conversation” and I discussed why I thought the song wasn’t as popular as their other hits before it. I even quoted the above lines. But today, I want to take a deeper dive into those particular lines because I’ve been thinking a lot about them since I posted last time.
When I was a kid watching my favorite TV shows, occasionally there would be characters who, in the course of conversation, would constantly offer famous quotes that they knew by heart. They would say something like, “‘I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.’ Socrates.” Or, “‘All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.’ Nikola Tesla.” The characters who did all that quoting seemed like the smartest, wisest people in the world to me. For months, I would pore over Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations trying to memorize pithy quotes so I could be like them.
Then I realized something. The characters so fond of quoting these famous thinkers were almost always the villains and by the end of the story, they were soundly defeated by the heroes. Sometimes the heroes would counter their quotes with another or even correct the villain’s misquote. But the hero never started the whole quote showdown, just like the hero never fired their gun first in a shootout.
What does all that have to do with today’s quote? The lines highlight how we can use education as a disguise to make ourselves and others believe we are deep thinkers. The villains never truly understood the meaning of the words they quoted (or they would have learned from them not to be villains), they were merely parrots of wiser people. Showing off one’s knowledge was a sure sign of not having any wisdom.
We can read our Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost—or books on the bestseller lists—and hang our Gauguin and Hockney reprints without ever getting the joy for and insight into life. Paul Simon was warning us that doing what is fashionable for the sake of being accepted is a rocky road of lifelong insecurity and dissatisfaction. That is how the bookmarkers measure what we lost. We lose the person we want to become.
Many of the quotes I feature on my Substack have permanent residence in my brain and I invite them out whenever I need their advice about the life challenges I face. They help me remember who I am and who I want to be. When I face a dark and muddled road ahead, they are flashlights that shine a bright beam to guide me down the right path.