When men feel inconsequential, it’s easier to blame women than it is to confront patriarchy-the true source of the diminishment and lack of meaning in so many men’s lives. When men feel unloved and disconnected, it’s easier to accuse women of not loving them well enough than it is to consider men’s own alienation from life. It’s easier to think of women as keeping men from the essence of their own lives than it is to see how men’s participation in patriarchy can suffocate and kill the life within themselves. It’s easier to theorize about powerful, devouring mothers than to confront the reality of patriarchy.
Beneath the massive denial of men’s power and responsibility and its projection onto women is an enormous pool of rage, resentment, and fear. Rather than look at patriarchy and their place within it, many men will beat, rape, torture, murder, and oppress women, children, and one another. They will wage mindless war and offer themselves up for the slaughter, chain themselves to jobs and work themselves to numbed exhaustion as if their lives had no value or meaning beyond controlling or being controlled or defending against control, and content themselves with half-lives of confused, lost deprivation. What men lack, women didn’t take from them, and it isn’t up to women to give it back.
— Allan G. Johnson (via wretchedoftheearth)
Vision without execution is hallucination. - Thomas Edison
There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. - Peter Drucker
The Coalition of No.
It’s easy to join.
There are a million reasons to say no, but few reasons to stand up and say yes.
No requires just one objection, one defensible reason to avoid change. No has many allies—anyone who fears the future or stands to benefit from the status quo. And no is easy to say, because you actually don’t even need a reason.
No is an easy way to grab power, because with yes comes responsibility, but no is the easy way to block action, to exert the privilege of your position to slow things down.
No comes from fear and greed and, most of all, a shortage of openness and attention. You don’t have to pay attention or do the math or role play the outcomes in order to join the coalition that would rather things stay as they are (because they’ve chosen not to do the hard work of imagining how they might be).
And yet the coalition of No keeps losing. We live in a world of yes, where possibility and innovation and the willingness to care often triumph over the masses that would rather it all just quieted down and went back to normal.
Yes is the new normal. And just in time.
-Seth Godin
Milton Glaser.
“If you have a choice, never have a job.”
“How you live changes your brain.”
“Style is not to be trusted.”
“The good is the enemy of the great.”
“On the one hand, in my own process of getting to grown, and acknowledging my needs as a grown woman, feminism gave me the language to both identify and advocate for my sexual needs, especially as a person who has been officially single for nearly my entire adulthood. Still, I find that sexual assertiveness is often met with suspicion. In the case of hetero interactions, many brothers see care as something that they only give to women they want long-term relationships with. Not fuck-buddies. Not jump offs. Not friends with bennies. Couple that with the fact that many dudes seem to have a terribly unsophisticated understanding of women’s bodies, I suspect because they gleaned many of their ideas from the 2-dimensional portrayals in porn, and you have an equation for terribly unfulfilling sex.
So how do we deal?
Well, I think that good feminist sex comes down to one basic element. No, not love. Care.
Good soulful, healing sex is certainly a reflection of this ethic; for it invites us to be ourselves (individual expressiveness), recognizes that our feelings matter (emotional justice), and demands that we prioritize our relationship to our partner(s) needs (radical empathy).”
Don’t stress over what could’ve been, chances are if it should’ve been, it would’ve been.
milton glaser commented in a documentary that teaching is treated with “low voltage contempt” in this country.
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle (via nirvikalpa)
