The Invisible Counterpoint

How do you make fun of a highly tech-savvy demographic while trying to dodge the inevitable backlash? Simple: you couch your criticism in terms that seem to come from some other place, while eventually circling around to mark your real target. Brooke Donatone followed this formula to the letter with a recent article at Slate titled “ Why Millennials Can’t Grow Up. ” Rather than write just another screed about millennials’ legendary self-obsession, Donatone chooses to hurl invective at “helicopter parents,” and their supposedly deleterious effect on the mental health of their millennial children. This rhetorical flourish is little more than a fig leaf for what is fundamentally just another crude hatchet job against roughly 76 million Americans. In her article, Donatone merrily skips toward the conclusion that a generation of over-parenting has produced a group of people who cannot “do laundry and homework on the same day.” Apparently unable to conceive of any legiti...

The moving force we likely know, but is not worthy of our love The universe, according to Dawkins, was put together randomly--not out of love, or hate, or volition, or disinterest. We find this disconcerting, because we are meaning-craving human beings. What I find strange is that Dawkins isn't more respectful of our need for things to BE beautiful, by which I mean, moved out of true love, not just out of fascinating processes, not just SEEM beautiful--to see in a forest something that is intrinsically spiritual and good, rather than just a marvelously successfully adaptive/adapting manifestation. If everything before us was made without intent--conditions simply lead to changes, formations--then why should it interest us so? That is, Shouldn't we become less interested in the fact of what is out there, now that we know it better, and more interested in how we--as meaning-making, as makers with the potential to create out of empathy, true love--are prone to see/perceive thi...

Dorothy wrote (in reference to something I wrote): "..the eat or be eaten "ethos" that was the only story the universe had to tell 'til that point." - What point was that? This has changed? Madoff/Enron/bcrail/Eron/etc.,etc.,etc. Is there in fact more than one used planet in our cosmos already? I am sure we don't live on the same one.. Do enlighten me, someone.. And in response, I wrote: Hi Dorothy. Happy holidays! If you are human and are treated kindly / lovingly in your childhood -- the reptilian part of your brain not withstanding--you will be a wholly (possibly sic) loving "entity." Most progressives have received a fair bit of love in their childhood -- the "universe" they came to know at birth (and even before, in the womb) was often a very loving, fun place. They can be counted on to want others to experience the same, and to do enormous good. And, ultimately, as they are the most creative/playful and least demon-h...