Columns from Times-Picayune writer Chris Rose chronicalling the days after Katrina. Very different view of the aftermath than Zeitoun or When the Levees Broke. Despite the crushing title, must say, hard to sympathize with upper/middle-class white folks after reading/watching the others.
Radiolab takes a different spin on stuck with three great stories in “Escape!”
Listened to this on a morning walk, and this quote from Carl Sagan made me stop in my tracks. Literally.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
Not your typical woo woo approach to freeing your inner artist.* The War of Art smacks you upside the head with jocular kernels of wisdom for getting over yourself and getting down to work. A good book with which to battle the resistance.
*With apologies to The Artist Way, which I really do love. A 12-step program for recovering creatives who’ve sold out to the man.
Voracious 