The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it. It’s rather like getting tenure. -Daniel Dennett, philosopher, writer, and professor (b. 28 Mar 1942)
Breaking Silence on Palestine!
January 20, 2019
Comments Off on Breaking Silence on Palestine! | 
Uncategorized | 
Permalink
Posted by billayers
Friday at WCF
January 19, 2019Dear Beloved Chicago Friends,
Please come to the launch party for Someday We Will Fly in Chicago on Friday, January 25th, 2019. We will read and talk and drink and eat cake at the bookstore, and then head to a nearby bar, somewhere tween and teen friendly. Please bring your little ones – we would love to see you there!
https://www.womenandchildrenfirst.com/event/book-launch-party-someday-we-will-fly-rachel-dewoskin
When: Friday, January 25th, 7 pm
Where: Women & Children First
5233 N. Clark St. Chicago, IL 60640
What:
Advance Praise for Someday We Will Fly:
“Rachel DeWoskin’s storytelling features an extraordinary combination of curiosity and kindness, on top of a belief that everyone can have an impact on the world they find themselves in. Someday We Will Fly is the powerful, adventurous story of a teenager who confronts the brutal history with courage, love, and imagination. I could not put it down.” – Aleksandar Hemon, author of Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project
“Particularly fascinating is the juxtaposition of the plight of Jewish refugees with that of the Chinese living in a Japanese-occupied Shanghai. A beautifully nuanced exploration of culture and people.” – Kirkus, starred review
“With pathos and a fine eye for historical detail, DeWoskin relates the story of Shanghai’s Jewish refugees during WWII, when Shanghai was under Japanese occupation. DeWoskin captures the crushing destruction of war and occupation, the unfathomable resilience communities can muster through cross-cultural friendships and acts of kindness, and the power of the performing arts to foster hope in times of struggle and desperation.” – Publishers Weekly
Rachel DeWoskin is the author of Someday We Will Fly (Penguin, 2019); Blind (Penguin, 2014); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); and Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005). She is on the core fiction faculty at the University of Chicago, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Centers for East Asian Studies and Jewish Studies. Read her essay on Derek Walcott in The New Yorker.
Comments Off on Friday at WCF | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by billayers
Zionism Explained
January 18, 2019
Comments Off on Zionism Explained | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by billayers
Zionism Explained
January 18, 2019
Comments Off on Zionism Explained | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by billayers
Loud and Clear
January 17, 2019
Comments Off on Loud and Clear | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by billayers
Another outrage!
January 17, 2019Criminal (in)justice in America:
Comments Off on Another outrage! | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by billayers
More on Chesa
January 16, 2019
Comments Off on More on Chesa | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by billayers
Chesa Boudin for DA of San Francisco!!!
January 15, 2019Our brilliant, focussed-on-justice, hard-working son Chesa is up and running, working to shine a light into the darkness. Front page in the SF Chronicle today. Join us!
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Chesa-Boudin-son-of-imprisoned-radicals-looks-13533584.php
Comments Off on Chesa Boudin for DA of San Francisco!!! | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by billayers
Teach Freedom
January 14, 2019An excerpt from my syllabus for a class I’m teaching on “Freedom”:
And men rejoice at being led like cattle again, with the terrible gift of freedom that brought them so much suffering removed from them.~~Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Wait! What? Freedom is a terrible gift that brings so much suffering? I thought freedom was a universal aspiration, something that each of us—and everyone we know or have ever heard about—values and desires, a condition that equals happiness and peace-of-mind.
Well, not so fast. Freedom also means risk and responsibility, precariousness and ambiguity. Jean Paul Sartre tells a story of a graduate student coming to him in occupied France during World War II with a fearsome and formidable dilemma: “My mother is deathly ill,” the student explains, “and I’m responsible for her care, but my father is collaborating with the Nazis, and in order to account for that crime I feel I must join the Resistance; what should I do?” After much consideration and discussion of pros and cons, Sartre says, It seems that you must choose. The student is unsatisfied: “You’re the great philosopher, sir! You should help me choose.” Well, Sartre continues, that is precisely the difficulty of every authentic choice, in fact, the problem of freedom—every yes is a no, every no, a yes, and you yourself—no one else—are responsible. You must choose. “You’ve been no help to me at all!” says the furious student. “I will go instead to a priest!” Sartre responds, Very well…which priest will you choose? We pick our priests, it turns out, to take the terrible gift of freedom off our own heads, to disperse it, or to blame the consequences of our choices on another—but still we choose!
Guarantees of happiness, peace-of-mind, and bread, crackle with tension against notions of freedom which, according to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, “men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread.” This conflict resonates as fundamental—we human beings find ourselves longing for certainty in an uncertain world, something we can hold onto and believe in together, answers to our doubts, perhaps, a single vaccine for the latest virus, the Truth in some final and unquestionable form. We have difficulty tolerating anything as vague and enigmatic as freedom, and this points to the universal allure of dogma and orthodoxy. The insistent message everywhere in society is this: acquiesce, conform, play the game—yes, accede, and perhaps you can call it freedom.
The Inquisitor looks at the rebels, and calls them stupid people, “rioting and driving out their teacher,” who will, soon enough, discover that they cannot keep up their rebellion—they, too, will find freedom burdensome as they retreat into their own shared certainty, their own sacred texts and easy beliefs. The dogma of the rebels, then, may become as insistent and totalizing as any other, and the distractions and comforts that come from membership in a credulous community can signal a break with freedom, even as it offers the advantage of being quasi-invisible—the dogma of common sense inside the group replaces the need for security police, barbed wire, the boot, and the stick.
Of course we can (and must) make a distinction between ideas and power—ideas aren’t tyrannical in themselves, but in the hands of those in power, it’s another story altogether. And so we must ask continually, which rebels and in what time? What are the specifics of their dogma? And who has the actual power to impose their orthodoxy on others as established law and rule?
What is freedom, then?
What are its central and necessary features?
What distinctions can you draw between personal freedom and social or political freedom?
Can a prisoner be free? In what sense?
Can someone on death row be free?
Can an addict be free? How about a person suffering something like severe dementia?
Are you free?
In what ways are you entangled or unfree? Can you name your unfreedom? Can you show the evidence?
Comments Off on Teach Freedom | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by billayers
Bill Ayers 