My wife and I recently celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Planning how we would mark the occasion was left to my discretion. Maybe I should have taken her on a vacation a second honeymoon of sorts.
Instead, I planned a gathering of a few dozen friends at our house. Perhaps I’m cheap, but one of the key reasons I did so is that I think of our marriage as a public thing, even if few people actually know the inner workings of our marital life.
Our marriage is an entity with ramifications and consequences that echo outside our home. The same is true in reverse: what happens in other marriages can affect ours. A marriage needs friends, and it can likewise supply friendship to others’ unions.
Misusing the F-word
To effectively combat today’s far right we must begin by rejecting lazy analogies. Jack Conrad calls for clear historical thinking
Liberal and left opinion has been in part horrified, in part dumbfounded by the repeated electoral successes of the far right: Narendra Modi and the BJP in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil; Russia, Japan, Turkey, Sri Lanka and Israel can also be mentioned. Above all, though, there was and remains Donald J Trump. Although soundly beaten in the electoral college and in the popular vote on November 3 2020, he still got 74 million votes. This surpassed the previous record set by Barack Obama by more than seven million, giving him the highest vote of any sitting president in US history.
The inclusion in the American Constitution of the right for free men to pursue happiness strikes me as naïve as Google s motto don t be evil . They are both naïve because they do not recognise the darkness of the human soul. That darkness is born witness to in our history and the art we produce. We should know that our actions are not pure and simple but are produced by mostly unseen forces within ourselves. In other words, we are all sinners. A gap exists between our good intentions and the meanness, envy, fear and hubris that we find in our hearts.