It's difficult to earn a living except through abuse, neglect, and harm. This is the lever by which we've been turned against one another.
I read this as I was preparing to go to class where I make a very decent living by teaching students to speak Spanish and appreciate Spanish literature. In my workplace, I'm surrounded by people who make their living by teaching their students a variety of fascinating and important things. This tweeter might not believe it, but we do not abuse, harm or neglect anybody by practicing our profession.
The following pompous and meaningless pronouncement comes from the Dalai Lama:
When patience is combined with the ability to discriminate between the action and the one who does it, forgiveness arises naturally.
So what, the actions of the Nazis who were condemned at the Nuremberg trial were bad but they, as people, were good? Murder is bad but all murderers should be "forgiven" and let out of jail? Actions do not exist independently of people who perform them. If a child molester or a rapist doesn't make the decision to molest or rape, these crimes will not take place. I also wonder how anybody can reasonably ask people to be "patient" when somebody commits a crime against him. Is a person who is being assaulted, for example, expected to submit patiently to the assault while trying to convince himself that the act of beating and the person who inflicts said beating are somehow magically unrelated?
The following is maybe the clunkiest and most dysfunctional metaphor I have seen in a long time (and I grade many student papers each semester):
The vending machine is capitalism: overpriced, unyielding, impersonal. It is indifferent to the penniless. If you want change, smash it.
I sincerely hope that this person doesn't do any writing on a regular basis because that would be a waste of perfectly good paper.
I might make posts about ridiculous tweets a regular feature of this blog because there are so many of them.
2 comments:
It wasn't a Tweet, but your comment on the Dalai Lama reminded me of something that happened a while ago at an event in my institution. Some students invited me to share a panel about the murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador in 1989. I accepted as a favor to the students that invited me.
Among the people in the panel was a professor of theology that started rambling about those murders, evil, and how he started questioning himself where was the evil in him (since both he and the murderers are human beings, I guess we all have evil in us). He said that we have to think about this episodes as a way that God has to show us the need to question ourselves. Awful.
Many theologians (is that the right word) take their elucubraciones way too far. There are, however, some very good theologians, like this one from South Africa whose blog I really like:
http://methodius.blogspot.com/
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