Ruth Bader Ginsberg, 1933 - 2020

Thank you Justice Ginsberg for all you did (and will continue to do) for the citizens of United States of America. I imagine all the adversity she fought through in her life and I wonder if I live my life with the same amount of courage. I heard someone discussing the ‘founding fathers’ of the United States recently. This journalist had a thoughtful point of view on what that means. Since the United States is a work in progress, (for example, our ‘founding fathers’ were the only individuals in society at the time who had franchise, rights, and power. many owned slaves) the people who ‘founded’ our society should be fluid and reflect our progress over time. Justice Ginsberg is a founding mother of our society. She punched the ceiling so many times it’s a wonder she still had hands. She was a giant. As said by her granddaughter in the piece below, it may be her late career dissents that are the most prophetic in the course of our democracy in the years ahead. She had the innate ability to write as if she was in a dark room and she held the only flashlight. May her passing and her death be the kick in the ass we all need to defend and protect the United States of America. Which includes protecting it from ourselves.

Hamilton: An American Musical, 2015

We watched this a couple weeks ago on Disney + and I could not believe how deeply it moved me. Hamilton is one of the most incredible pieces of art I have seen in any medium. We watched the play on a television screen, completely removed from the ‘room where it happened’ and it was still unbelievable. The wheels within wheels of meta-representation is staggering. Perhaps the most impactful aspect of the play is the simplest. Telling a white American origin story through the language of hip-hop played exquisitely by black and brown Americans. Lin Manuel Miranda, his original cast and crew are geniuses. The United States can still be a shining light on a hill when our best and brightest produce work like Hamilton.

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Jon Favreau interviews Jon Stewart

Sage thoughts on the political industrial complex. It made me reexamine my defense of Democracy in the United States. I think the right to vote is pure, almost holy. But if we don’t take every step to extract corruption, greed and rot from the institutions and those that serve us, we have nothing.

#44 - President Obama, 2009 - 2016

The Poetry of Campaigning and the Prose of Governance. I heard A.O.C. say this the other day. The first part is eloquent the second part is pragmatic and ripe for a lot more criticism, but the work was always there. Right now we could use both from the Obama years. Not only President Obama, but his team for each term. People who woke up everyday believing democracy was a vehicle to help people. That tough problems should be stared down, critically thought through and collectively solved.

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