#411, in which the weary world rejoices
7 years ago
CPM == Curious Physics Minor, of the 100 Hour Board at BYU.
The problem, according to Kerr's line of thought, isn't that government and businesses may have intricately detailed information about citizens, or that they might be actively working to collect such data as part of an extensive program of electronic surveillance. The concerns, Kerr says, should be focused on how such data is safeguarded and how Americans view the importance of that data.
Autumn
The smell of a campfire
somewhere in the distance
drifts along the road.
Leaves rustle in the wind
discontent with their new home.
Yellow, Orange, Red, Brown
Against the grey sky.
And although far away,
I close my eyes, breathe the cool air:
I'm sitting under my old Maple
And, for a moment, all is well.
Holi
Blue skies and green fields
Surrounding the domed temple.
People filling the space around:
Speaking, laughing, enjoying life.
The music stops, the fire glows;
The witch erupts in flame.
As the past is burned
the colors fly.
Caked in red, blue, yellow, green
we celebrate a new life.
The rays of sunset pass
through the festival of colors.
" ... The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think-- for the same reason-- that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one's mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you-- just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he's taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but is own enjoyment-- just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!-- an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired, and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience-- or to fake-- a sense of self-esteem.
.....
Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws-- and he will have to cut himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find.... He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all he is worthy of enjoying. He has equated virtue with pain and he will feel that vice is the only realm of pleasure. Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom, and sex-- nothing but shame."