Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Legacies
[tags: _philippines ¦ _news]
At last, after a period in the wilderness, de Quiros goes back to the sort of inspired, challenging writing I enjoyed.
"...there is an even bigger reason why I want my kids to develop a capacity to think for themselves. It is not just to equip them to defend themselves from the world, it is also to equip them to defend themselves from me. Or at least from my generation. I go back to the proposition I made at the beginning, which is that the hardest enemy to fight is oneself. The hardest enemy to see is oneself. It’s a truism, but it’s true: The rebels of yesterday are the tyrants of today.
Some very literally so. Nothing for me constitutes a bigger irony than that the same activism that taught us to question everything under the sun also demanded that we never question the cause we were espousing. Or indeed the methods it employed. To do so was to be called a revisionist, not unlike being called heretic by the Church, and suffer the same fate. "
How true. I was never an activist, nor a die hard defender of the Establishment. I like to believe that I have always thought for myself, even if at times I've come to the same conclusions. I hate the labels of conservative and liberal, left and right; the political process to me seemed to be nothing more than a glorified sales pitch, or else an endless feedback loop which quickly degenerates into high pitched noise.
My emotions and my politics have always been very personal, and (I admit) very self interested. I sometimes wonder what my children would make of the values of my time: an unhealthy obsession with money, a naive belief in technology and progress. MOst likely they will think of us in the same way we think of those idealists from the '50s and '60s: except instead of flying cars and plastic houses, we pin our hopes on the Digital Networked Economy(tm) and the Open Software Revolution(tm)(r)(c) even as children in Niger and Sudan and North Korea starve to death.
I like to believe that my children will see our excesses as benign rather than barbaric, that our penchant for Blackberries and Wifi did not, in fact, push us closer to the apocalypse. And even that, in our own, techno-obssessed way, we helped keep it at bay.
At last, after a period in the wilderness, de Quiros goes back to the sort of inspired, challenging writing I enjoyed.
"...there is an even bigger reason why I want my kids to develop a capacity to think for themselves. It is not just to equip them to defend themselves from the world, it is also to equip them to defend themselves from me. Or at least from my generation. I go back to the proposition I made at the beginning, which is that the hardest enemy to fight is oneself. The hardest enemy to see is oneself. It’s a truism, but it’s true: The rebels of yesterday are the tyrants of today.
Some very literally so. Nothing for me constitutes a bigger irony than that the same activism that taught us to question everything under the sun also demanded that we never question the cause we were espousing. Or indeed the methods it employed. To do so was to be called a revisionist, not unlike being called heretic by the Church, and suffer the same fate. "
How true. I was never an activist, nor a die hard defender of the Establishment. I like to believe that I have always thought for myself, even if at times I've come to the same conclusions. I hate the labels of conservative and liberal, left and right; the political process to me seemed to be nothing more than a glorified sales pitch, or else an endless feedback loop which quickly degenerates into high pitched noise.
My emotions and my politics have always been very personal, and (I admit) very self interested. I sometimes wonder what my children would make of the values of my time: an unhealthy obsession with money, a naive belief in technology and progress. MOst likely they will think of us in the same way we think of those idealists from the '50s and '60s: except instead of flying cars and plastic houses, we pin our hopes on the Digital Networked Economy(tm) and the Open Software Revolution(tm)(r)(c) even as children in Niger and Sudan and North Korea starve to death.
I like to believe that my children will see our excesses as benign rather than barbaric, that our penchant for Blackberries and Wifi did not, in fact, push us closer to the apocalypse. And even that, in our own, techno-obssessed way, we helped keep it at bay.
Labels: philippines
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