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When Call The People: My World My Responsibility

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Abhijit Naskar

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“As [Isaiah] Berlin wrote to George Kennan in 1951, 'What we violently reject is ... the very idea that there are circumstances in which one has a right to get at, and shape the characters and souls of other men for purposes which these men, if they realized what we were doing, might reject.' The respect for individual liberty goes hand in hand with the recognition of human dignity as a fundamental principle and is incompatible with treating human beings as sheer material to be conditioned and shaped at will.”

LibertyHumanismModerationMarxismTotalitarianismAuthoritarianismPolitical TheoryUtopianism
Book:Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes
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“[Author's Note:] When my grandmother came to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1940s, she was a beautiful, glamorous woman from a wealthy family in the capital city, and the young bride of a dashing naval officer. She expected to be received as such. Instead, she found that people here had a very reductionist view of what it meant to be Puerto Rican, of what it meant to be Latinx. Everything about her confused her new neighbors: her skin tone, her hair, her accent, her notions. She wasn't what they expected a boricua to be. My grandmother spent much of her adult life in the States but didn't always feel welcome here. She resented the perpetual gringo misconceptions about her. She never got past that resentment, and the echoes of her indignation still have some peculiar manifestations in my family today. One of the symptoms is me. Always raging against a perceived slight, always fighting against ignorance in mainstream ideas about ethnicity and culture. I'm acutely aware that the people coming to our southern border are not one faceless brown mass but singular individuals, with stories and backgrounds and reasons for coming that are unique. I feel this awareness in my spine, in my DNA. So I hoped to present one of those unique personal stories - a work of fiction - as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear. And in so doing, I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate. When we see migrants on the news, we may remember: these people are people.”

FictionEmpathyPrejudiceHumanismSolidarityMigrantsWhy Writers WriteReasons For WritingCombating Stereotypes
Book:American Dirt
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“Our uniqueness implies unique responsibility that we as individuals have in the world. It also implies an unavoidable loneliness. Here Ghandi’s words come to mind: “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.” We are all minorities of one in the sense of our uniqueness and loneliness. But in searching for the truth and the meaning of our lives, we “intercept” with others who are doing the same and our loneliness at least will not have to be experienced as isolation. And in chess too, we “intercept” with others in this common interest that is much like life, where everything we do matters, where we have to participate responsibly, and the more responsible our participation is, the more we feel at home. As such it can have a highly affirmative effect on the person, a sense that the individual gets: “Yes, I belong to this world, I am part of how things get decided, of how things get achieved. I share this with others.”

LonelinessHumanismChessMeaning Of LifeIsolationHuman Uniqueness
Book:Character Education with Chess
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