Sunday, June 18, 2006

YES!!!!!!

He's BACK!

And not with a new essay (which would have been cool too), but with the first chapter of a new book!

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the head up.

{doing the happy dance}

More Bill Whittle to read!


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1 Comments:

At June 18, 2006 1:57 PM, Blogger Alicia said...

Wow. I'm glad he's "back" too--I still have a zillion archives to majority of human lives has lived under, and continue to live under to this very day...we can chose to impose upon our internal fault line a series of laws and customs, a Civilization, that imperfectly attempts to keep as many of us as possible on the side of the angels.

That's what you've discussed in the past, right--Society, and it's ability to make laws, not to control, but to create a good Society. I think he made a light bulb connection for me, a bit later:

>But the elbow grease, the one indispensable element, is that belief: belief that this work is worth doing. It is the belief that we can drain the open sewers of our most base impulses, and in their place build lives of decency and civility. It is, in the long run, the belief that we can make Tinkerbell fly.

I read that as, conquering the "intellectual cynicism" (that we've also discussed before)--or the way that people sometimes unnecessarily criticize our society or our President (or make cop-outs, like some of the articles you've posted in the past)--but overcoming that and believing that this is possible. "That we can make Tinkerbell fly..." that human beings are worthwhile, and that we can establish a society worth being part of.

The way that he described the sense of helplessness...wow. I think I used to feel something like that, but without the words to say it--and then, both you and others have described the sense of helplessness in more concrete terms. I loved the way that he described competing worldviews (which, I don't think, caused these problems--but which makes it hard to talk about them with people who believe differently in the causes)--and then likened it to making a map of the coastline where one must never proclaim the coastline to be wrong, instead.

His faith, that this is possible (belief), shone through the entire essay. I was--not just convinced--but also touched by this. We long for discussion that maps the coastline properly...well, such a thing exists.

 

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