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A DIFFERENT TAKE ON WISDOM FROM A DIFFERENT TIME

A DIFFERENT TAKE ON WISDOM FROM A DIFFERENT TIME

A poem many of my gen­er­a­tion tacked on our bed­room wall includ­ed the line: “And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the uni­verse is unfold­ing as it should.” Depend­ing on your point of view, that was either com­fort­ing or dis­con­cert­ing. I won­der which one the author, Amer­i­can poet and writer Max Ehrmann, would have felt if he’d penned it today, rather than in 1927.Read the rest

CARING SHOULDN’T BE JUST AN AID PACKAGE

CARING SHOULDN’T BE JUST AN AID PACKAGE

“Com­pas­sion”, the 19th cen­tu­ry Pol­ish philoso­pher Arthur Schopen­hauer wrote, “ is the basis of morality.”
In a world sore­ly in need of copi­ous amounts of it, com­pas­sion is both high­ly selec­tive and hostage to a short atten­tion span on the part of the pub­lic and the news media, the inevitable con­se­quences of the way news is disseminated. Read the rest

Racist War Reporting? I Beg to Differ…

Racist War Reporting? I Beg to Differ…

Accord­ing to a recent head­line: “Cov­er­age of Ukraine has exposed long­stand­ing racist bias­es in West­ern media”. The thrust of that and sim­i­lar arti­cles was that reporters not­ing the vic­tims were Euro­peans, rather than peo­ple we nor­mal­ly think of as being refugees, were guilty of racism. As a jour­nal­ist who has cov­ered more than a few con­flicts, I beg to differ.Read the rest