Choosing/Decision-Making

I've written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and you can learn more about him from my podcast conversation with Martin Doblmeier, who directed a documentary about him, which I learned a lot from. I included Bonhoeffer in my upcoming book as a historic role model. He could have passed through WWII unscathed. Instead he chose to engage. In particular, he participated in an attempt to assassinate Hitler. On the face of it, of course. Hitler was destroying the world. But Bonhoeffer followed Christ, especially the Sermon on the Mount. How could he justify killing someone, no matter how bad or evil he considered that person? People often ask hypothetical questions today of what you might do if some quandary involved Hitler. These questions for us are just…

Is someone criticizing Taylor Swift's flying lately? People talk to me about it all the time. In the past few days, a few people told me she was in the news for flying a few miles on her jet. Today, I turned the corner from Sixth Avenue onto Waverly and saw the scene below. I didn't want to include identifying pictures so didn't take it from their front, but what you see is an encampment of five or six people on the street. If you saw their faces, you'd see they're zoned out on whatever they're addicted to. They seem a tight community, but unhealthy, surrounded by waste, wrecking the environment for everyone around them. This image is what I associate with private jets (also…

Do you believe we should remove statues of people who held slaves? Thomas Jefferson I can see both sides of people taking down statues of Thomas Jefferson. He was President of the United States and helped write its founding documents. He advanced freedom. Yet he was a racist who believed men in Africa mated with orangutans (he spelled oranootan in his 1784 Notes on the State of Virginia) and owned slaves. Since he would never choose to be a slave, how can anyone excuse enslaving others? He could have freed them but didn't. If you had inherited slaves in Virginia before the Thirteenth Amendment, would you have freed them? I suspect you would say yes without hesitation. Maybe, like Robert Carter III, you would have…

A friend commented that public transportation should be free. I texted back "I concur." I've considered the issue from many angles before. There are many pros and cons and I've concluded the benefits outweigh the costs. Many agree. "Around 100 cities in the world offer free public transit, the vast majority of them in Europe, especially France and Poland," according to the New York Times' piece Should Public Transit Be Free? More Cities Say, Why Not?. "Nearly 100 cities worldwide offer free public transport" agrees Nature's piece last week, Degrowth can work—here’s how science can help. "Countries with area-wide zero-fare transport" is a small but growing section in Wikipedia's Free public transport page. There are tons of articles on the growing trend. Drawbacks Wikipedia first…

Elections are coming up. They happen about once a year. People fly all the time. We buy takeout and bottled water all the time. We buy cars all year round and fill up our gas tanks daily. Which of your actions impacts the world more: voting once a year or two or spending thousands of dollars every year on polluting industries that grow from our purchases, infiltrate government, control legislation, and tell everyone they're providing goods and services people want? As long as we pay them, they're right. They don't buy their own products. We do. They're doing what we pay for. We pay for what they're doing. We don't have to buy what they sell. None of it is necessary for living and thriving.…

People who tell me I'm wasting my time trying to lead culture toward sustainability: My mom, my dad, the lady at the coop checkout today, nearly everyone. People who tell me to stick with it: Nelson Mandela ("It always seems impossible until it's done."), Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Jesus, Winston Churchill ("Never, never, never give up."). Also Harriet Tubman's quote I posted a couple days ago: If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going. To help me decide whose advice I should follow, here's an athlete crawling through mud with determination. To think…