How to be Modern Again.

March 20, 2012 at 12:00 P.M. "Errors" reinserted in this essay were corrected, again.

March 27, 2011 at 11:48 A.M. A previously corrected "error" was reinserted in this essay and corrected, again. For a discussion of these techniques, see "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory."

October 6, 2010 at 2:52 P.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected. Mr. Suarez will begin his trial for corruption in federal court this week. More arrests are coming to Hudson County. Yuk, yuk, yuk ... right, boys? ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "New Jersey's Legal System is a Whore House.")

5 essays were defaced today. I hope to make all corrections soon. Many of the inserted "errors" have been previously corrected. I will bring the pop corn to the Suarez trial. Who is next? Bob Menendez?

October 26, 2009 at 4:12 P.M. "Errors" were inserted, once again, and I have corrected them -- until next time.

Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 329-367, pp. 515-551.

Marcelo Dascal, "Reflections on the 'Crisis of Modernity,' " in Marcelo Dascal & Avner Cohen, eds., The Institute of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis? (Illinois: Open Court, 1989), pp. 217-240.

Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1-55.

Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Ontario: House of Anansi, 1991) entirety.

Robert Pippin, Modernity as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 1-16, pp. 148-167. (If you are planning on attending the University of Chicago, this is the book to read now.)

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 73-122.

George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 133.

Roberto Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), pp. 104-142.

"Onwards and Upwards," in The Economist, December 19, 2009, at p. 37. (Uncharacteristic lapse into incoherence at this magazine.)

What is modern? What is Modernity? (I will capitalize "Modernity" to designate the specific cluster of ideas associated with the bourgeois revolutions and industrialism in Europe and the United States.) How are the two related? Are you modern? Or are you postmodern? Maybe you're a post-postmodernist and a "Vegan"? (No, Vegan is not something sexual.)

Most people in a so-called "pragmatic" culture fail to appreciate how the boundaries and horizons of their lives -- what they think and/or experience -- are shaped by ideas, often unfamiliar ideas that they do not understand very well. We live within prevailing world-views, including those we detest and try to reject.

In a recent editorial focusing, allegedly, on the idea of "progress" (which is undefined and confused by the anonymous author), assumptions are made concerning scientific and moral progress "conflicting," unavoidably, and there is a failure to see: 1) this distinction depends on the assumed validity of Modernity's fact/value divide; and 2) genuine "progress" of any kind implies a moral component which undermines the fact/value divide. Perhaps it will also be assumed, for some unstated reason, that all forms of empiricism must conflict with idealism. ("Derek Parfit's Ethics" and "What is Enlightenment?")

"The point is not that science is harmful, but that progress in science does not map tidily on to progress for humanity." (Economist, p. 38.)

Progress is both a term of factual assessment and an "evaluation" or judgment of worth. Even to say that a weapon is better is to imply that it is "worthwhile" or that there is a kind of progress in making a better weapon.

Are there beings other than humans who do science? Is "progress" in science different from moral progress or "progress for humanity"? Or does the concept of progress always imply, necessarily, that things which "progress" are more rather than less "good" for humans? The concept of "good" is a moral concept: "From the perspective of human progress, science needs governing."

Haven't you told us previously that science "progresses"? What kind of progress do you wish to "govern" in order to ensure that "progress" is "progressive"? Please provide an example of "progress" that is not "progressive." We are told that: "As Joseph Schumpeter famously observed, silk stockings were once only for queens" -- Does this refer to sexual-orientation? -- "but capitalism has given them [queens?] to factory girls." (Economist, p. 38.)

Unfortunate logical problems and linguistic incoherence are EMBARASSING aspects of this article that are unusual for this wonderful publication. What happened? ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")

"And [And?] it is not just that material progress does not seem to be delivering the emotional goods. People also fear that mankind is failing to manage it [what?] properly -- with the result that in important ways, their children [whose children? mankind's?] may not be better off than they are." (Economist, p. 40.)

Are not all children part of "mankind"? Finally, my favorite of about fifteen absurdities: "People want to determine how the world works, not always to be determined by it." (Economist, p. 40.)

Determined by the world, you mean? Or how "it" works? To learn how the world "works" is to discover what, allegedly, determines our material actions, if not our meanings or values. Again: what is meant by "progress"? Causality operates in the material world, according to those pesky scientists -- who "progress," allegedly, even if they do not "progress emotionally." Incidentally, this author mangled the quotation from that obscure text "The Declaration of Independence." Jefferson refers to "inalienable" rights not rights that are "unalienable." No, that is not "the same thing." (Economist, p. 40.)

For a sense of what this author may have wished to say, if the person were coherent, see "S.L. Hurley on Beliefs, and Reasons for Action." Perhaps the author was drunk.

I was surfing channels the other day when I came accross an interview on PBS with a religious-political leader from a country that I will not name. This interview was featured on American television for several purposes: 1) We all want to feel superior to such people, to see ourselves as enlightened and "educated" whereas "they" are not. 2) Demonizing the opposition is effective in any military conflict. Part of what was going on by broadcasting this interview is to say: "Aren't these people scary?" 3) A message of "gloom-and-doom" always sells on television, setting up viewers for a one minute pitch for hemorrhoid medication and life insurance that comes later, either on this t.v. station or elsewhere.

I am fascinated by the connections that may be traced between high-cultural developments and philosophical conversations -- conversations often taking place above most people's heads -- and such daily phenomena as television's claim to "bring you the world in three minutes." How much control is exerted on people simply through denial of philosophical education or sophistication is difficult to say. The struggle against philosophical slavery will never end.

From the point of view of the person interviewed by the intrepid American reporter, the caricature of American society to which he is reacting is not only less worthy of admiration than his own country, but a kind of insane asylum. America is depicted as a collection of lunatics with great technology and weapons of mass destruction. That caricature (like the bizarre view of his society for most Americans) bears little resemblance to either reality.

I sensed the interviewee's horror and polite attempts not to be insulting when he was asked about America. How can it be that I predicted at these blogs the uprisings in Yemen, Syria, and continuing rumblings and discontents in Saudi Arabia long before the events unfolded, seemingly to the surprise of American officials, who only needed to read newspapers to see what was obvious in that part of the world.

The subject of this interview is not a stupid person. The problem isn't that persons in Islamic societies, for example, are "uneducated." It is not that such persons may be ignored because they are without a university degree in "marketing" or an MBA, say, from the University of Pennsylvania.

Many such highly devout persons in non-Western societies certainly are educated. The person I am thinking of happened to be a physician, a graduate of an elite university in France -- also multilingual. Many members of the elite class in Middle Eastern and other Islamic societies attend universities in the U.S. or Europe, as well as in their own countries, earning impressive graduate degrees. How can he think of women that way? Why doesn't he eat organic rice? Why isn't he a liberal subscriber to the Nation? We must educate him.

These reactions from Americans -- who think of ourselves as highly enlightened -- merit careful examination because they are products of the forbidden topic of culture. Concerning the intellectual basis of equality for men and women, Charles Taylor says some things that are even more applicable to the encounter between cultures:

"If men and women are equal, it is not because they are different, but because overriding the difference are some properties, common or complementary, which are of value. They are beings capable of reason, or love, or memory, or dialogical recognition. To come together on a mutual recognition of difference -- that is, of the equal value of different identities -- requires that we share more than a belief in the principle; we have to share also some standards of value on which the identities concerned check out as equal. There must be some substantive agreement on value, or else the formal principle of equality will be empty and a sham. We can pay lip-service to equal recognition, but we won't really share an understanding of equality, unless we share something more. Recognizing difference, like self-choosing, requires a 'horizon of significance,' in this case a shared one." (pp. 51-52.)

So much of the problem during that interview -- and many others like it -- is the complete lack of communication between journalist and subject, each of whom inhabits a totally different philosophical worldview, or culture, even as they coincide in a single historical moment. Part of me wanted to laugh as I saw that neither person could understand the other. Another part of me wanted to cry as I realized how many young men and women in the world will die because of avoidable violence produced by such "failures to communicate."

Cruel embargos? Ignorance among the powerful is lethal in a complex and multicultural world, where civilizations rub up against each other in an overcrowded planet, even as they grow further apart, both intellectually and culturally -- although the language used to describe very different "things" is deceptively identical -- so that this interviewee (like the President of Syria interviewed by Diane Sawyer) is a "Star Wars" fan.

The meaning of the imagery in those films, however, is evocative of entirely opposed archetypal systems, though this is not perceived by the two persons "in dialogue." They have seen very different films, even if they were at the same movie. Cinematic discourse, offering true opportunities for encounter and communication, is dismissed by both parties as trivial. That's just aesthetics, which can't be important.

"Have you seen any good films lately?" This is usually the warm-up question. People fail to realize that cinema is one shared "horizon of significance." If you were to ask each dialogue participant afterwards whether he or she was a "modern" person, both would say "yes!" -- while claiming that the other is not. And both persons would be correct. They are simply referring to different understandings of Modernity.

Progress? What kind of progress? Whose progress? The statistics quoted in the Economist article -- or some of them -- may have been fabricated. No source is listed for these facts. "Feminism" is a contested term today, so is "sexism." Neither of those words can be defined apart from "power." This does not deprive of us of the concept of truth. These issues were also ignored by the journalist for this magazine.

When a person sees a movie -- like, say, The Matrix -- an entire cultural and individual history is brought by each person to the encounter with the cinematic text. This includes childhood religious and narrative experiences: 1) Christians experience the movie's relation to the Gospel story in a visceral way; 2) Jews will sense the allusion to the messianic component in Judaism and the search for a "homecoming"; 3) Moslems will identify with the theme of struggle, moral and other kinds of struggle -- which is the true meaning of jihad. Agon. (If you don't know that last word, look it up.)

Others will bring similar archetypal references to their experience of such a film, including universal ones. Thus, everyone will relate to what Campbell describes as the "hero's quest." Struggle is what I do, for example, by making the same corrections numerous times, after every reinsertion by hackers of "errors" in this essay. The hackers' goal is to discourage and frustrate me, to induce depression and despair. These techniques are used by powerful forces in American society, I believe, to narrow the scope of public debate. This is difficult to do on the Internet. It may have the opposite of the desired effect on me.

Harassment tactics are a form of censorship. Censorship and other forms of oppression are as common in America as they are in most other places, but we are more hypocritical about it. Occasionally, through confronting the society with its own Constitutional principles, you can force politicians and judges to do the right thing. This may be a good time to insert an "error" in this essay, again, New Jersey.

As for Modernity, the conflict between religion and politics is not found in Islam. The idea that religion is not part of a "modern" objective approach to political problems does not seem obvious to highly intelligent men and women in Islamic societies. This is not because Moslems are "stupid" or "don't get it." Religious and political culture are different in Middle Eastern societies because these cultures are not defined against a context of "secular objectivity."

The concept of "objectivity" is not understood to be in tension or conflict with "religion." Subjective/objective in Islamic thinking is a continuity, not a bifurcation. This Islamic view is highly compatible with current scientific thinking. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")

Western Modernity is shaped by such factors as the French and American revolutions, scientific triumphalism, and industrialization. These phenomena then result in the bifurcation of the private and public, fact and value, spirituality and public life or politics. These paradoxes or "antinomies" (Roberto Unger) are not defining of the project of Modernity -- as it has been reinterpreted elsewhere in the world. Paradoxes and pathologies may be one undesired effect of Western scientific knowledge and technology -- efficiency in public life -- which is accepted, pretty universally, even if democracy is not. China understands this dilemma and has been making exactly this point to America for years.

"The general 'German' idea of self-determination or self-grounding is, Hegel says, the principle of modernity, as fundamental in that tradition to the modern authority of natural science as it is to modern claims for liberal-democratic institutions. And it is the principle that has generated the most suspicion among those convinced that this is what would have to be defended if modernity were to be defended, but who remain dubious about such prospects." (Pippin, p. 14.)

For Westerners, Modernity or the "Enlightenment Project" is about coming to terms with Kant (autonomy). The thinker who lived through the entirety of the Critical theory -- responding most powerfully to Kant -- is Hegel (community) and Marx (social justice in community).

In cultures where these men are not first on the lips of intellectuals their ideas are nevertheless entangled with desired benefits of the project of Modernity (such as the scientific revolution, technology, intense industrialization). These are things which most people everywhere want, intensely, usually without realizing the philosophical baggage that comes with them. Appreciating intellectual entanglements becomes, literally, a life or death issue in this context. To quote Duncan Kennedy, these entanglements "are the link-back that completes the system."

Autonomy without community is not enough. But then, neither is the opposite: no real community is possible without individual autonomy. The greatest mistake in seeking any understanding of the U.S. is the failure to appreciate that, at the heart of American Constitutionalism, there is and can be no final resolution of this tension. America is the balance between these necessary and mutually dependent values -- a balance that is always shifting.

The United States of America is always a paradox because it is an once the modern and also the exemplary postmodernist society. There are multiple and -- necessarily conflicting -- aspects to this nation or "universe" in which we live. ("Master and Commander.")

If you wish to have an image to keep these ideas in focus, then think of two children -- one is male and well-dressed, white; the other is African-American, female, poor, shoeless -- and they are on a seesaw. One end of this seesaw is autonomy; the other is community. The more affluent boy sits at the autonomy end of the seesaw (Republicans), the young African-American girl sits at the community end of the same seesaw (Democrats). If either child falls off the seesaw, or fails to cooperate with the other, everything stops and there is no more fun. That seesaw experience for those children is American Modernity (Republicans)/Postmodernity (Democrats).

We are both of those children. At the moment, the two children are not cooperating at all -- so nothing much is happening. This is called "political paralysis." It is sometimes fatal.

Time to plagiarize this text? Keep the insults and attacks coming, New Jersey. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

Chief Justice John Roberts is the well-dressed boy on that seesaw; Judge Sonia Sotomayor is the shoeless young girl on that same seesaw. Both justices are needed on the United States Supreme Court. The issue is not whether the life-experiences of each person will enter into decision-making by him or her, but whether objectivity is nonetheless possible. The answer is "yes, objectivity is possible." ("What is Law?")

There is a greater chance of achieving objectivity and truth for the Supreme Court of the United States of America if both sides of that eternal American dialectic are represented in judicial decisions.

As a man who has been raped, stolen from, slandered, enslaved, and otherwise violated, whose writings are censored, suppressed, altered, whose professional life has been destroyed, who is illicitly and in an evil fashion separated from a loved-one whose presence in life he needs -- as someone who has suffered in these ways, I nonetheless continue to believe in America. One day we will abide by our Constitution. ("America's Holocaust!" and "Give Us Free!")

Autonomy may be crucial to science and democratic freedoms, despite the tension between autonomy and valued aspects of any society's traditional cultural life -- such as links to nature, emotive meaning, aesthetic production, religious experience, family, political community. Societies may want the "bonus" (science, industry, free enterprise) of Modernity without its "onus" (loss of community, permissiveness, sexual licentiousness, loss of religious faith).

The ONLY place where persons from any society concerned with the problem of Modernity (including those who do not refer to it in such terms) may meet for genuine communication is the aesthetic realm, especially popular media today. We must not forget to communicate in the language of symbols. I fear that we are neglecting this capacity for symbolic communication in a search for impossible scientific knowledge of human subjectivity and its products.

"I do not believe that the answer to its challenge" -- the challenge of nihilism -- "can be found within linguistic theory ... I do not believe that the 'dismantled fortress of consciousness' (Paul Ricoeur) can be restored or made stormproof by replacing this or that fallen brick. Appeals, however 'blameless' and commonsensical, to the pragmatic, to the history and daily volume of intelligibility, of mundane reference and interpretive consensus, which ... continue to 'do the job' in the Platonic-Augustinian accomodations of our ordinary lives, will not yield an adequate reply. Or, more exactly, for them to do so must, I think, require of us a readiness to envisage, literally to look upon the face of, foundations beyond the empirical. We must ask of ourselves and of our culture whether a secular, in essence positivist, model of understanding and of the experience of meaningful form (the aesthetic) is tenable in the light or, if you will, in the dark of the nihilistic alternative. I want to ask whether a hermeneutics and a reflex of valuation -- the encounter with meaning in the verbal sign, in the painting, in the musical composition, and the assessment of the quality of such meaning in respect of form -- can be made intelligible, can be made answerable to the existential facts, if they do not imply, if they do not contain, a postulate of transcedence." (Steiner, pp. 137-138.)

America is associated both with the bonus and onus of Modernity. Hence, the love/hate relationship among many people in the world with the United States. Hollywood -- no matter what trendy bullshit to the contrary is spouted in places like the East Village of Manhattan -- is overwhelmingly on the "love" side of the ledger for billions of people. Hollywood is one territory where all of these tensions are happily resolved, partly because American imagination is given free reign there, even as it is increasingly curtailed elsewhere -- in government and law, for example.

A good Hollywood/New York movie is a successful ride on that seesaw, and everybody likes that, but a great film is also an effort at what Steiner calls: "transcendence." My "tip" is to see any movie made by Mr. Harvey Weinstein's company -- remember "Miramax"? -- especially if a film is set in New York.

Only one inserted "error"? Come on. You can do better than that, Mr. Rabner. ("No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!" and "Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

Every good movie -- movies may be good or great in different ways -- is a bundle of symbols communicating multiple messages, only some of which may be intended or understood by film-makers. No one is better at this powerful language than Americans. It is also true that Hollywood earnings and all media revenues far exceed earnings for U.S. car companies. This is a significant fact. Perhaps we can no longer speak of what is good for GM being good for America, but we can be confident that the success of American cinema, at its best, still says something important, good and true about what is indestructible and beautiful about the United States of America.

If you have not done so, especially if you are not an American, see "Saving Private Ryan." You are Private Ryan, unless you are a Nazi. Sorry, Mr. Santorum. Whatever mistakes are made in American foreign policy, remember the U.S. is a nation that paid that high price -- never entering into any "pact" with Hitler -- and will do so again, if necessary, to protect not simply freedoms guaranteed and always threatened under the Constitution, but also the very idea of fundamental rights and human dignity as applicable to all persons.

That's no bullshit. Those values are at the center of America. The Tom Hanks character in Saving Private Ryan is a guy and/or gal that I have met, more than once, studied with, spoken to in America -- even in New Jersey. What you see in Spielberg's war movie -- heroism and courage in defense of freedom by ordinary people -- is real.

I have to find that one honest guy in the FBI. I may be able to get some of the computer criminals in Trenton arrested. Raylan Gibbons? No, Raylan is a U.S. Marshal. ("'Justified' -- A Review of the FX Television Series.")

In light of contemporary international politics, see "High Noon" and ask yourself: "Would I join that sheriff? Or run away when the bad guys show up? Is there a danger that any of us -- including the sheriff -- may become one of those bad guys? What is happening to American law today? How do we explain not just Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but the indifference to the atrocities on the part of legal authorities temporizing when it comes to human rights and due process of law? We need Judge Sotomayor on the High Court.

My daughter's thumbs up signal after the Sotomayor nomination was anounced suggests that every American may now feel represented in the Court's reasoning about our priceless Constitution. New Jersey, it is time to stop defecating on the Bill of Rights.

October 26, 2009 at 4:05 P.M. Several new "errors" were inserted in this essay since my previous review of this work. Just this afternoon, my computer's clock was altered by an hour. This is an example of abuse of government power that allows officials from America's most corrupt state, New Jersey, to urinate on America's Constitution as young men and women give their lives for freedoms violated by Trenton's censorship and cover-ups. I will spend part of every day for the rest of my life "urinating" (metaphorically speaking) on New Jersey's legal system and soiled Supreme Court. Mazeltov, Stuart. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?")

These collective-subconscious insecurities and anxieties reveal themselves in our dominant cinematic culture, for example, where ideals of Modernity have become problematic in a cynical, post-Holocaust age. Nothing better is yet available, of course, while the need for belief has never been greater. This dilemma is experienced by people all over the world as important. It is lived intensely. Hence, the "Star Wars" saga and "Matrix" story to which we withdraw for guilt-free pondering of the question of meaning, so that no one is offended. Plus, a "Supercombo" and some twizzlers always makes philosophy more fun. "The Hunger Games," can't be as bad as it seems.

I would accept death or any torment if I could go at least once to a movie with someone very special, then for a burger afterwards to discuss the movie and do my best to make her laugh. When she laughs, all the infinite pain in her life goes away. American cinema often makes people everywhere laugh for similar reasons -- to take away the pain. And there is a lot of pain to take away. (See "The Sure Thing" and any of Woody Allen's comedies, especially "Play it Again Sam.")

Love, philosophical speculation, notions of community have been banished to the denigrated private realm, the "feminine" territory of the trivial, having to do with weekend plans and other such insignificant stuff; important masculine energy is concerned with business, military matters, science, politics. The result is the wonderful success that America is enjoying in the world right now. Everybody just loves us.

This last statement is an example of "irony" which is something we are not good at any more since it seems to have something to do with aesthetics. America's political culture has become schizoid. It's only a matter of time before these ideas are stolen by magazine writers, usually when they become obsolete. Why isn't more original thinking seen in those "elite" publications? ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be tortured?" then "Derek Parfit's Ethics" and "What is Enlightenement?")

America's "self-delusion" and excessive fantasy is such that N.J. officials defacing these essays, publicly, may be incapable of detecting the irony and hypocrisy in any ettempt on their part to discuss my "ethics" or legality for all of us. ("Legal Ethics and Legality" and "New Jersey's Unethical Judiciary.")

A word was deleted from the foregoing paragraph, again.

"In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away 'prejudice' or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created." (Rorty, p. xvi, emphasis added.)

Isn't it a little of both, creation and discovery? Take a look at Diane Sawyer's interview with Syrian president, Hafez Hassad. Notice the change in both persons' expressions when American movies were discussed: the relaxation, smiles, traces of youthful enthusiasm visible in their eyes. The interview, briefly, became a genuine conversation between two people, where warmth was felt and trasmitted. It was no longer "work" for a journalist and political leader. A great opportunity was missed to delve into deep issues relevant to the peace process.

Why not remain on that aesthetic level just a little longer and address some "serious" issues in terms of cinematic language? Why not evoke the positive archetypes that are embraced everywhere in the world, associated with America (accurately in many cases), that may open cultures to a true dialogue with us?

Think of this challenge of communication as just another mission for Luke Skywalker. The bad guys are those corporate blue suits, wearing dark glasses, with money in their pockets. Agents. Rebel forces in Washington lead the forces of light. People smiling at these suggestions have already proven my point. On the Republican side, both John McCain and Rudy Giuliani can do kung fu against the machines. Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama are up on jiu jitsu in the air, in slow motion. Whoa ...

"Hey," my teenage daughter said to her friend recently, "Ms. Rudeness Giuliani, why didn't you call me?"

Humor about political figures and unselfconsciousness about laughing at powerful politicians is essentially American. Well, duh. In aesthetic play these tensions of our world are kept in balance. Something about America still captures and expresses the imagination of the world -- along with humanity's capacity for optimism. We are a hopeful people. American enthusiasm and passion are contagious -- both will be found in the best American movies -- and in the next president of the country.

Does my saying this really provoke hatred and hostility? Why? Is it more about the messenger than the message? Is it unacceptable that I am saying these things, despite being denied publishing opportunities while coping with harassment and censorship? Why do I frighten powerful people in this country? Truth to power? ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

It may be time for America to invite all the other "kids" on the block to play soccer with us in the park. During that game, we can talk about our differences and how we might improve things for all. We refuse to give up on the goal of improving things for everybody. We also refuse to abandon anyone who wishes to meet us half-way.

The global soccer game today is a great movie. Everybody is invited to join us and share the popcorn. "Mad cool."