Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
Interpretation
War results in profound suffering and destruction, leaving a lasting impact on humanity.
This quote by Lewis Mumford encapsulates the grim realities of war, highlighting how it brings about a range of horrors such as suffering, physical and emotional injuries, destruction of infrastructure, terror among populations, starvation due to disrupted resources, and ultimately death. It serves as a powerful reminder of the devastating consequences that warfare inflicts on society and individuals alike.
In practice
During a lecture on the impacts of conflict, I quoted Lewis Mumford to illustrate the harsh realities of war.
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group...devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.
Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created."We effectively became "time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers" with the invention of the clock."
By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.
The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them.
Better to mock the game than to play and lose.
To be ourselves we must have ourselves β possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must βrecollectβ ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.
White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers.
The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.
But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.
Being able to live without having to be defined by your skin color is the hallmark of privilege.
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