I want to affirm for reasons I maybe only partly understand something President Obama said today to graduating students at Rutgers.
Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science – these are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy… In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.
Affirm it because I may want soon here to try to understand the draw of Drumpf. He poses a grave danger and the danger’s got to be understood. And I think for me, understanding it, how he draws so many in, means going to what’s irrational and tribal and hungry for authority in me. What feels worn down by liberal piety and wants to be told its first thought’s okay after all.
I’m a poet and believe in a beauty outside the precincts of the rational. That’s a bound on Obama’s statement, one I think he’d assent to. Irrational, arational, supra-rational.
I’m also a Buddhist, and that’s meant finding the whole range of human goodness and depravity in my own breast. I don’t get to say the bad shit’s out there. To understand Drumpf I need to look at some ugly right in here.
I want us to be governed by compassionate reasonable people. We deserve to be. After all we’ve been through, some of us more than, we all deserve to be.
Don’t take any thoughtplay to come to mean otherwise.
Just want to bring light into dark corners. Mine own. Spider-chasing.
the art of compost 