When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual.
Slowly we adjust, but only if we have to.
It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I’m going through.
We owned what we learned back there; the experience and the growth are grafted into our lives.
I vote because it’s what small-d democracy is about. Because there are places where people fight for generations and stand for hours to cast a ballot knowing what we ought to remember: that it makes a difference. Not always a big difference. Not always an immediate difference. But a difference.
We want our children to fit in and to stand out. We rarely address the conflict between these goals.
If there’s a single message passed down from each generation of American parents to their children, it is a two-word line: Better Yourself. And if there’s a temple of self-betterment in each town, it is the local school. We have worshipped there for some time.
Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.
I vote because even the lesser of two evils is the lesser of two evils.
Women have gained access to the institutions, but not enough power to overhaul them.
How many of the people I know – sons and daughters – have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers.
My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.
We continually want to unmask our heroes as if there were more to be learned from their nakedness than from their choice of clothing.
We each have a litany of holiday rituals and everyday habits that we hold on to, and we often greet radical innovation with the enthusiasm of a baby meeting a new sitter. We defend against it and – not always, but often enough – reject it. Slowly we adjust, but only if we have to.
I don’t know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.
In today’s amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.
On television, journalists now routinely appear on talk-shows-with-an-attitude where they are encouraged to say what they think about something they may not have finished thinking about.
I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of acceptance, hasn’t also produced a moral lobotomy. In the reluctance, the aversion to being judgmental, are we disabled from making any judgments at all?
Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.
In the biotech revolution, it is the human body, not iron or steel or plastic, that’s at the source. Are the biocapitalists going to be allowed to dig without consent into our genetic codes, then market them?