Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
id907085104
given the kind of narcissism, not just in Vance, but in all of us, we have to kill it every day. The great Goethe says you’ve got to wake up and kill the worst inside of you in order to win what he called freedom and existence, and he’s right about that. Of course, Christians talk about learning how to die every day. When Dorothy Day wrote her eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr., she said he learned how to die every day. What does that mean? That means dealing with the hatred and the envy and the greed and the resentment inside of each and every one of us to emerge with courage.
✏️ Why is that in all of us? Why do we all have narcissism and envy and greed, and we have to battle it every day? How is that in our human nature, hand in hand with love and forgiveness? What does that say of human nature? followup questions 🔗 View Highlight
id907085495
those of us who are committed to the moral and spiritual forces will hold on. See, I come from a people, brother, who’ve been on intimate relations with catastrophe, calamity, monstrosity—244 years of the most barbaric slavery of modern times, and then another hundred years of neo-slavery, of Jim and Jane Crow, lynching black folk every two and a half days for 50 years. How do we generate some courage to love, courage to hope, courage to resist, courage to remember, courage to have a reference for something bigger than our egos? Moral and spiritual cultivation. How do you cultivate? By example, not by textbook. No, not by words on paper.
✏️ Values matter.. values in action and example, not in talk and words. 🔗 View Highlight
id907086473
The Klan and neo-Nazis and so forth choose to be thorough-going gangsters. There’s no doubt about that, but I also acknowledge I’ve got gangster proclivities in me. I have to fight it every day, and they’re still my foes. They’re still my enemy. But there are ways of staying in contact with the humanity of even your enemy.
id907086229
you sat down, and you had a cordial conversation. At the same time, you always know your enemy. You always know what you’re fighting, and you still talk in the language of having an enemy and knowing that there are forces of evil in the world.
✏️ The difference is in the details. Some would say, don’t talk or engage with the people you abhor. Others say we need to ignore the differences and embrace that we’re one people. And here’s Cornell saying, sit, talk, be cordial, but always remember what you’re fighting and who the enemy is and that there are forces of evil in the world (as well as inside of ourselves). 🔗 View Highlight
id907086641
we’re able to revel in each other’s humanity even as we have these disagreements. But part of it has to do with the fact that you recognize that everyone is going through a process, and everyone can change. They can change from better to worse. They can change from worse to better. And so you never foreclose anybody’s possibility of undergoing change. That’s one thing. All of us are in process. On the other hand, we’re not naive, not at all.
id907086681
what was it about them? They had a humility. They knew, in fact, that they could be wrong, but they were convinced that they could be enforcers for good, and therefore they were always open to people undergoing change. And that’s very important.
id907086815
I just tell them that I have deep opposition to my dear brother Robert’s position, and we fight it out. But we also overlap on other things, in terms of we both have concern about anti-poverty programs.
id907086802
But I wouldn’t call it a collaboration, though, brother, I would call it more a Socratic conversation that tries to see where we overlap.
id907088131
we’re in a very dim and grim time, but we have to have a blues sensibility. And the blues is about wrestling with catastrophe, but never allowing catastrophe to have the last word, because we have a love and a courage and a joy inside of us that can never be taken away.
id907088924
we have to be revolutionaries in the deepest sense. And revolution is about what? The sharing of power. Too many people are powerless: the sharing of resources. Too many people are poor: the sharing of respect. Too many people are disrespected: in the end, the sharing of love. Too many people don’t have love, brother.