Anticipating 2020



Evil is a contagious choice.





Prepare.



1.       Speak plainly.  Avoid jargon that mystifies. Don't be abstruse.

2.       Read articles and books that challenge your cherished prejudices.

3.       Use critical thinking and inductive reasoning  in constructing arguments;  segregate verifiable facts from enthralling opinions.

4.       Be cold, nuanced, and confident.  Meekness in a combat zone is not effective.

5.       Stand your ground.  Blast first.  Apologize later.

Act.

1.       March forth with discipline, honesty, and rededication to ancestral wisdom.

2.       Let us be supportive and constructively critical of one another.

3.       Be prudent in selecting and managing our terms of engagement with our planet, our adversaries, and our comrades.

4.       Be attentive to the diverse changes that have impact on the quality of our lives and our sanity.

5.       Be surprised by nothing.

Perspectives and Purposes.

1.       Look without overmuch fear at dread,  at the progressive erosion of literacy, morality, and ethical behavior in the United States and other parts of our world, at systemic racism, at the ascent of domestic and international terrorism, and at the crises that receive scant notice in American news sources and social media.

2.       Be skeptical of the unreliable promises of buried in such key abstractions as empathy, love, justice, charity, peace, and happiness.

3.       Put great distance between ourselves and what common sense reveals to be bad faith and ideological nonsense.

4.       Exercise our right to participate in the shaping and writing of history; expose the historical hypocrisy of people who appropriate our ideas without acknowledging the sources.

5.       Do not expect gratitude for what we do well, but accept gratitude with modesty should it ever appear. Do not be ashamed of the fact that we truly have cognitive limits, that we  do not know it all, that we can indeed acquire valuable insights from idiots and enemies.

6.       Do not permit sinister, death-bound leaders and their tribes and institutions (including literature as an institution) to lead us into swamps of no return. Do not be complicit in enslaving yourself and others by denying that slavery yet exists in the 21st century.  The name of the game is war.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            12/31/2019 3:49:57 AM

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