Life: same old story, elections, connections

Ahh… winter in Montana… almost. Today has actually been gorgeous, cold, but sunny. I’ve been relatively lazy:

• finished an article for my upcoming Kant paper (“The liberal-communitarian debate in contemporary political philosophy and its significance for international relations” by David Morrice);
• sat on the sun porch and talked with my lovely girlfriend (so far away in Spain…)
• did laundry
• ate lunch (Persian yogurt with rice, thanks to my housemate Ali)
• contemplated starting my Kant paper (due Thursday)
• jumped onto blogger (knowing I’ve neglected to blog in oh so long).

I’m feeling rather satisfied by the elections. America has stumbled down a destructive, unilateral (read ‘isolationist’), and ultimately incoherent path for the past five years. It speaks, I suppose, to our fragility as a people that the 9/11 attacks could have given rise to so much racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and hatred.

We forget, perhaps, that the second largest terrorist attack ever carried out in the US was by a white, Irish, ex-military, American boy named Timothy. Perhaps because it was an attack from within we have quickly wiped it from our memory. But then too we failed to realize our connections to the cause. He was labeled an extremist, internal, but isolated. We say the same of radical Muslims, as if these men and boys (and small but growing percentage of women) don’t have connections to more moderate family and friends, who in turn do not have connections to family and friends who are more moderate, and so on until we reach ourselves.

A simple case for me is my Iranian friend Ali. How can I call Iran ‘evil’ or have any sympathy with people who do when I know my good friend’s parents and siblings are there, living lives not entirely different from my own (perhaps even now eating a bowl of Persian yogurt).

But I digress… If you know me you know my story: we’re all connected in this world of ours. We can try to cut off our own limbs when they displease us, but if we’re wise we’ll reach out, intellectually and physically, to humanity and all creation as it is, part of us.

That said, I’m happy for the election for hopefully bringing our current course of things (but then, didn’t the president recently drop the ‘stay the course’ rhetoric?) to something of a halt. I’m not terribly confident, however, that there will be much of a change in direction. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if we had 2 years of nasty partisan fighting.

But… The laundry is done. The Kant paper awaits. Life intrudes. And we just keep going.