POCKET PARADIGMS

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To accept the full consequences of the degradation of the environment,
the explosion of incarceration, the creeping militarization, the
dismantling of democracy, the commodification of culture, the contempt
for the real, the culture of impunity among the powerful and the zero
tolerance towards the weak, requires a courage that seems beyond us. We
do not know how to look honestly at the wreckage without an overwhelming
sense of surrender; far easier to just keep dancing and hope someone
else fixes it all.

Yet, in a perverse way, our predicament makes life simpler. We have
clearly lost what we have lost. We can give up our futile efforts to
preserve the illusion and turn our energies instead to the construction
of a new time.

It is this willingness to walk away from the seductive power of the
present that first divides the mere reformer from the rebel -- the
courage to emigrate from one's own ways in order to meet the future not
as an entitlement but as a frontier. - Sam Smith

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