Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
Alice WalkerRead
The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.
Interpretation
Loneliness can provide a unique perspective on society and its flaws.
Alice Walker suggests that experiencing loneliness can lead to a profound and radical understanding of society or one's community. This solitude allows individuals to think critically and see truths that may be overlooked in the hustle and bustle of daily life, pushing them to consider new ideas and perspectives that challenge the status quo.
In practice
During a lecture on social justice, I quoted Alice Walker to emphasize the importance of understanding the marginalized voices in our society.
Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.
I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.
Donβt ask me why I obsessively look to rock βnβ roll bands for some kind of model for a better society. I guess itβs just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since.
The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant.
Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be.
Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.
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