Having a growth mindset is essential for success.

It's widely believed that people with agrowth mindset tend to be happier and more successful. The good news is, it's a trait that you can develop in yourself over time and these growth mindset quotes will help you exude more positivity in your everyday life.

Carol Dweck introduced her theory of mindsetsin her 2006 book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. As Dweck explores in her book,there are two distinct mindsets that contribute to a person's beliefs in their abilities: fixed and growth.

In a fixed mindset, people believe that their qualities are fixed traits unable to be changed. As Dweck explains, they spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success.

On the other side of the spectrum, people with a growth mindset believe they can develop themselves through dedication and hard work. "Brains and talent are just the starting point," says Dweck.

RELATED:50 Positive Quotes For Work That'll Help You Rise & Grind

To inspire you to develop your own growth mindset, we've compiled a list of 45 quotes to empowerand encourage you!

1. Always do what you are afraid of doing. Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity! Albert Einstein

3."No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking." Voltaire

4. "Nothing is impossible. The word itself says Im possible!" Audrey Hepburn

5. Believe you can and youre halfway there. Theodore Roosevelt

6. Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed no hope at all. Dale Carnegie

7. Picture your brain forming new connections as you meet the challenge and learn. Keep on going. Carol S. Dweck

8. "Success is not an accident, success is a choice." Stephen Curry

9. "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." Walt Disney

10. Part of evolving and becoming who we're meant to be whoever that isrequires respecting our inner selves so that we may be centered. Only then can we truly be happy. Martika Shanel

11. "Theres no such thing as failure, only results." Tony Robbins

12. "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." Steve Jobs

13. "If you quit once it becomes a habit. Dont Quit." Michael Jordan

14. "I am not afraid of storms for I am learning to sail my ship." Louisa May Alcott

15. "If you dont give anything, dont expect anything. Success is not coming to you, you must come to it" Marva Collins

16. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. Christopher Robin

17."All things are difficult before they are easy. Thomas Fuller

18. What does not destroy me, makes me stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche

19. "We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light. Mary Dunbar

20. It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. E.E. Cummings

RELATED:30 Motivational Quotes And Memes That Will Inspire You To Never Give Up

21."You miss 100% of the shots you dont take. Wayne Gretzky

22. "I dont believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process. Oprah Winfrey

23. "Life isnt about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." George Bernard Shaw

24. "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" John Maynard Keynes

25. "It is never too late to be what you might have been." George Elliot

26. I wont just have a job; Ill have a calling. Ill challenge myself every day. When I get knocked down, Ill get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but Ill strive to be the grittiest.Angela Duckworth

27. No matter what, people grow. If you choose not to grow, youre staying in a small box with a small mindset. People who win go outside of that box. Its very simple when you look at it. Kevin Hart

28. At 54, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be. Michelle Obama

29. You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety. Abraham Maslow

30. Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today. Malcolm X

31. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Aristotle

32. A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers. Helen Keller

33. Action is the foundational key to all success. Pablo Picasso

34. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett

35. Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. Harriet Tubman

36.Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. Henry Ford

37. It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time for we are bound by that but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time. T.S. Eliot

38. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. James Baldwin

39. You dont have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step. Martin Luther King, Jr.

40. We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel...is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. Ursula K. Le Guin

41. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones weve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. Barack Obama

42."Life is not about waiting for the storms to passits about learning how to dance in the rain. William Shakespeare

43. I am always doing what I cannot do yet. In order to learn how to do it. Vincent Van Gogh

44. Its sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity. Its about mindset of looking at the world in a playful and curious and creative way. Adam Savage

45. What allowed me to take that first step, to choose growth and risk rejection? In the fixed mindset, I had needed my blame and bitterness. It made me feel more righteous, powerful, and whole than thinking I was at fault. The growth mindset allowed me to give up the blame and move on. The growth mindset gave me a mother. Carol S. Dweck

It's essential to be aware of which mindset you are in. Your attitude has a profound impact on how you learn, develop skills, interact in relationships, and professional success.

Someone may think, "I am dumb, why try?" leading to performance issues in a fixed mindset. Because they believe there is no way to change and that talent and ability are innate, they don't challenge themselves and learn slower.

When a fixed mindset person fails (which they will, because everyone does),it reinforces their belief that they just cant do something.

Alternatively, because a growth mindset person believes they can practice and work hard to improve, they learn more, faster, and more thoroughly in a growth mindset. They experience more successes, which then reinforces their belief that putting in the work pays off.

Fostering a growth mindset is important, not only to develop skills but also to create healthy self-esteem.

Developing a growth mindset allows you to learn from failures, seek out challenges, push your limits, and communicate sincerely.

As we can see, having a growth mindset opens doors that otherwise would go unopened.

RELATED: 45 Best Motivational Songs To Keep You Inspired All Day Long

Let's make this a regular thing!

Rachel Reed is a writer and editorial intern interested in news, culture, self, and relationships.

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45 Inspirational Growth Mindset Quotes That Unveil The Power Of Positive Thinking - YourTango

Promoting positive attitudes, providing behavioral health support, and making education attainable are just a few ways tablets are promoting mental wellbeing among incarcerated individuals

FALLS CHURCH, VA / ACCESSWIRE / September 10, 2020 / GTL, a trusted partner that connects those affected by incarceration with the resources and support necessary to achieve success, today announced its support for World Suicide Prevention Month. Mental illness does not discriminate based on housing location-in fact, over 55% of incarcerated individuals suffer from mental illness, and there are more individuals with mental illness in correctional facilities than in psychiatric hospitals.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 800,000 people die by suicide each year, including 48,000 Americans. For incarcerated individuals, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that suicides accounted for 4% (federal prisons) and 7% (state prisons) of deaths in custody from 2001-2014. However, suicides are the leading cause of death at local jails, accounting for over 35% of deaths in 2014.

"While GTL is more than just a technology company, it is through our technology that we are able to provide solutions that help address mental health issues in incarcerated populations," said Pelicia Hall, GTL Senior Vice President, Reentry Programs. "Within correctional facilities, I have noticed two game-changers in addressing mental health issues. One is the ability to connect with loved ones and the other is the availability of technology as a resource. Using GTL's technology platform to provide positive programming to aid in addressing mental health concerns across the industry is key. Incarceration is one of the lowest points in someone's life, and we need to ensure that every individual is given the help and support they need to climb back up again."

Facilities that have deployed GTL tablets have noted decreases in suicide attempts and ideations, as well as decreases in inmate-on-inmate violence, inmate-on-staff assaults, and behavior code violations. At one facility, the introduction of GTL tablets dropped the facility's suicide ideation and attempt rate. Not only can incarcerated individuals spend their time reading books, watching movies, listening to music, and playing games, they can also take educational courses, read religious texts, and meditate. The Peace Education Program from The Prem Rawat Foundation helps improve mental health and well-being by renewing a sense of purpose in participants. Breaking Free from Substance Abuse assists individuals in achieving and maintaining recovery from dependence on over 70 different substances.

"Suicide in correctional facilities is a national crisis," said Matthew Caesar, GTL Executive Vice President, Customer Solutions. "Both ideations and attempts are a threat to all persons involved in corrections, and the rates of suicide for incarcerated individuals are far higher than the national average. At GTL, we provide resources and support to those affected by incarceration. As part of that, our GTL tablets include applications that promote a positive attitude, increase morale, make books and educational content accessible, and help individuals recover from substance abuse. Our free calling program also now provides weekly contact between incarcerated individuals and their loved ones, boosting morale and increasing positivity."

About Us

For over 30 years, GTL has worked side-by-side with correctional facilities and government agencies to provide imperative technology solutions to the populations they serve. These solutions facilitate meaningful connections, provide educational opportunities, enable successful reentry, and strengthen operational efficiency. GTL is headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, with an employee presence throughout North America and provides solutions in support of 1.6 million inmates across the globe. To learn more about GTL, please visit http://www.gtl.net, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Contacts:

Randy Brown Work: 703-215-5383 media@gtl.net

SOURCE: GTL

View source version on accesswire.com: https://www.accesswire.com/605571/Recognizing-Suicide-Prevention-Month-Using-Technology-to-Decrease-Suicide-Ideations-and-Attempts-in-Correctional-Facilities

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Recognizing Suicide Prevention Month Using Technology to Decrease Suicide Ideations and Attempts in Correctional Facilities - Yahoo Finance

You are here: Home Lifestyle Career As We Think Ahead to the Fall, Its Very Scary: Local Businesses Prepare for Uncertain Months Ahead

The Covid-19 pandemic has made things difficult for everyone, but nobody has felt it harder than business. Local restaurants and businesses have dealt with the extra challenge of providing services, meeting financial goals, and {most importantly} keeping people safe. As restaurants welcomed backed customers to indoor dining in the past week, local businesses have reflected on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected them, along with concerns that affect their immediate future. Read more to find out how the Covid-19 pandemic affected local Hoboken + Jersey City businesses.

After Governor Phil Murphy signed an executive order in March urging people to lockdown, most businesses found it difficult to stay afloat. Some made a quick decision to lay off their entire staff. Others struggled to adjust to cyberspace. The Covid-19 pandemic, most business owners agree, has reshaped the very nature of local business.

In the early days of the pandemic, Cafe Peanut put an emphasis on helping frontline workers. We were involved in helping the front line workers such as JCMC doctors and nurses, fire department, police department, Greenville community, and much more, said Ilir and Dorota Mani, owners of Cafe Peanut. We donated hundreds of freshly made meals and specialty lattes and coffees. Our community supported us and the ones that needed it most. Without them, it would be impossible for us to continue being open and survive the global pandemic. The business has been impacted tremendously. We are talking here 30% of revenue comparing to pre-COVID months.

Gyms in Hoboken had to make difficult sacrifices. Jay Wein, the owner of Hudson River Athletics, said, There isnt a way that Covid-19 has not affected our business. When Weins gym closed on March 15, it immediately began to lose members. Over the course of the past 6 months, weve lost 40% of our membership due to the ongoing pandemic. Ive had to lay off 7 of my 10 coaches, a decision that was both necessary and gutting. My business is built on the community. It runs on connection, belonging, and inclusivity, values that reflect both our gym community and Hoboken as a whole. And right now, it feels like its all at stake, he said.

Read More: Hoboken City Council To Debate $117 Million Budget at Wednesday Meeting

Fit Foundry saw similar drops in membership and maintained gym programs online. Dave Quevedo, the owner of Fit Foundry, said the gym offered virtual on-demand and group classes. In June, they started outdoor classes. We never stopped, Quevedo said. We found a way to get it done.

Other businesses said they had to shut down for several months when the pandemic first hit. Shaka Bowl closed its Monroe Street location for three months, said Krista Gormeley, an owner of Shaka Bowl, merely out of a concern of safety for our team and customers and because it was the most logical thing to do at the time. Gormeley said closing for three months gave us much needed time to regroup, rework our business, and find different ways to be successful.

John Rotundo, director at Hudson Family Chiropractic, closed his practices office for two months despite being considered essential. Rotundo said that he used that time to create a reopen plan. That plan included every possible safety precaution I could find, including sneeze guards, gallons and gallons of sanitizer, gloves, masks, hospital-grade cleaning solutions, touchless thermometers, and altered scheduling. The stress of how and when to open was immense, but we did it as safely as possible and patients have been extremely satisfied with our precautions.

In the food sector, businesses like the Cliff JC struggled tremendously. Owner Eva Johannesdottir shared with Hoboken Girl, During the first week of the shutdown back in mid-March our business plummeted. So much so that we had to close our doors entirely for 7 weeks. Once our staff felt safe and comfortable enough, we opened our doors again and this time for pickup and delivery only. We revamped our menu to eliminate food that doesnt travel as well for delivery, she shared, noting the difficulties of the current menu in March. Being we are mostly a brunch restaurant we had to rethink our entire business as people dont generally order eggs to go. We added two evenings of dinner service with dinner plates such as roasted salmon, tacos and a lobster roll. We made sure to still offer menu options for kids as lots of parents were looking for family-friendly meals.

In other cases, some businesses could lean on virtual sales models they had already built, although large groups of workers were still laid off.

Kate Jacobs, the owner of Little City Books, said online sales kept them busy, but they couldnt afford to keep employees. We furloughed most of our staff and worked crazy hours totally transforming our sales model and keeping up with hundreds of online orders. Customers have been incredibly loyal and supportiveordering books to be sent out of town to where they were quarantining, sending books to friends, being really patient with delays and mess-ups. After George Floyd was killed, we were nearly swamped with orders for books about race, most back-ordered for weeks and weeks.

Summer is usually when business thrives. But this summer, most businesses have felt the impact of stringent safety regulations, occupancy restrictions, and public health concerns.

One industry, however, has seen a surge in customers: mental health counseling.

Courtney Glashow, the owner of Anchor Therapy, a counseling service in Hoboken, said their sessions have stayed booked. A lot of people have been having a hard time this summer since it wasnt a normal summer, Glashow said. According to an August 2020 study published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 53% of adults in the United States reported that their mental health has been negatively impacted due to worry and stress over the coronavirus. In March 2020, by contrast, 32% of adults reported stress or worry over the coronavirus.

Most other businesses saw their sales dip significantly. To attract customers, owners said, they had to rethink major aspects of their business.

See More: The Reopening List in New Jersey: Whats Open? What are the Rules?

Erika Shah, the owner of Playful Paws, a dog walking, and grooming service, said most of their time is now focused on animal grooming and haircuts. In June, our grooming portion was instantly busy as many pups like ourselves desperately needed hair cuts, Shah said. Unfortunately, the dog walking and daycare portions of our business continue to operate at only a fraction of our pre-pandemic business. Many clients are still working from home and simply dont need these services or have moved out of Hoboken.

Jen Choi of Sugar Suckle, a custom cakery, said We knew that sheltering in place meant that families would be spending more time together at home and could benefit from fun, kid-friendly activities to do around the house. So we created DIY baking kits with pre-measured ingredients, essential supplies, and step by step instructions. We refreshed the menu each week with new recipes and themes.

Boutiques and fashion suppliers had to rethink what clothes to offer, and how much fashion should cost. The owners of Coup de Coeur, a womens boutique, said they had to change their stores concept and put a focus on digital marketplaces. We felt that with so many people unemployed and furloughed that we needed to lower the price point, because we just didnt know what to expect, they said. We didnt think people were shopping. Yes, everybody shops, but how realistic is it for someone to come in and buy a two hundred dollar top for the summer? So, we mixed up the merchandise.

Throughout the summer, restaurants have depended on alternatives to traditional dining, such as outdoor dining and prepared meal kits. As the number of Covid-19 cases in New Jersey slowly stabilized, government officials lifted occupancy restrictions on businesses. In September, Governor Phil Murphy announced the return of indoor dining at 25% capacity.

As we think ahead to the fall, its very scary, said the owners of Coup de Coeur.

Some businesses find it difficult to predict the fall and winter seasons for their business, but most agree that it doesnt look good.

Last fall, we were very, very busy, said the owners of Coup de Coeur. We were successful in selling work clothesblazers, going out clothes. Now we think ahead to the fall, theres so much uncertainty.

Wein, the owner Hudson River Athletics, said its been hard not to worry about the winter. The outdoor workouts were a welcome gift when the weather is nice, but what will happen to when the mercury dips? These past months have threatened to kill my business and we are doing everything we can to stay positive, from both cash flow and attitude perspective, but its been really tough.

In September, Hoboken adopted a new law allowing local businesses to have outdoor dining throughout winter.Allen Bari, the owners at Hudson Table, said he already heat lamps ready for the winter. We have heat lamps ready for the late fall/early winter, and we plan on adjusting the menu to help with the warmer months, Bari said. We also hope to use the viaduct tunnel with heat lamps that will hopefully provide some warm dinner nights.

Business owners generally agree that it will all come down to creativity. Pete Martinez

In May, lawmakers formed the Hoboken Relief Fund to support local businesses through grants. The Relief Fund has raised $400,000 for local businesses since June, with a goal of $2 million. Anyone can donate to the relief fund through their website. The Hoboken Wellness Crawl is also donating a percentage of its ticket proceeds to the Hoboken Relief Fund. Jersey City also created a similar fund.

Another way to support local businesses is also the most obvious: shop locally. However, local businesses also depend on support from government officials and the business community to stay alive. Most businesses said that theyll take all the help they can receive.

Erika Shah, the owner of Playful Paws, said that government officials should continue to offer grants. Like many small businesses, Shah said, we have many great employees who have been with us for years who we hope to keep employed throughout and post-pandemic.

Kate Lombardo, a co-owner of Hudson Yoga Project, shared her thoughts on landlord/tenant relief. Truthfully, our government leaders can help by providing guidance for small businesses and landlords about what to do with rent. We were mandated to be closed and are now only able to open at limited capacity, but there have been no mandates as to how that should be reflected or adjusted in what we pay in rent, she shared with Hoboken Girl. Our landlords also have businesses to run, and there has been limited guidance for them as well in terms of the help available. If our leaders addressed this issue, many of the local businesses would be able to stay the course until were able to open at full capacity again. But, if local businesses have to pay full rent while only being allowed to open at 25% capacity, its going to be nearly impossible for them to stay afloat.

Other business owners pointed to initiatives launched by the Hoboken Business Alliance, including gift cards and shop local signage. Erin Clyne, the owner of Wellness Lab, said, I love the Gift Card program that just began today through the Hoboken Business Alliance. Knowing that my clients will receive a discount in these tough times and that my business is being supported at the same time is a huge plus.

Read More: Hoboken + Jersey City Businesses Born During the Pandemic

Increasing shop local signage and continuing the slow street program would also help, said Kate Jacobs, owner of Little City Books. 1st Street has so much interesting retail now, Jacobs said. If the City could help fund outdoor temporary structures retail kiosks much like the summer Streateries and Parklets that would be good.

Eva of The Cliff had even more specific ideas. When asked, she offered this list for the Jersey City government:

1. An ad campaign paid for by the city featuring local eateries in all wards not just downtown Jersey City. 2. Do away with fees or drastically lower municipal fees for items such as licensing renewals. 3. Stop the collection of the recently added payroll tax. 4. Lobby Trenton to drastically change the liquor laws in the State of New Jersey. All businesses should have equal access to purchasing a liquor license directly from the state for a reasonable amount just as you can do in almost every other state in the USA. Restaurants do not make any money on offering their customers to BYOB. And most small business owners can not afford the astronomical rate for which licenses are sold these days. 5. Promote a No sales tax week for all small businesses during the winter months. 6. Award and rotate government-related catering jobs to small businesses. 7. A centralized website with resources for grants and funding both public and private. 8. A website for local job listings so that we can hire within our community. {PS: Hoboken Girl has this! Click here}

Still, some businesses said that they dont need anything other than the local community to continue what its been doing.

Joe Schiavo, the owner of The Shepherd and The Knucklehead, said he is grateful for the Hoboken community for their support, particularly over the past few months as he opened his Lemonade Stand and had lots of patrons throughout the pandemic, all picking up to-go cocktails and brews. Theyve gone out of their way to support us, share what were doing, and bring people in, he said. They provided for me more than I could ever ask for.

Matthew was born and raised in a small Arkansas town, and right out of high school, he moved to Hoboken to take classes at Stevens. Immediately feeling at home in the Mile Square, he's enjoyed exploring restaurants on Washington Street, scootering on Frank Sinatra Drive, and getting a taste of the big city life. When he isn't writing for his college paper or studying for a test, Matthew likes to see musicals, go to comedy shows, and jam to music with friends.

Read more:
'As We Think Ahead to the Fall, It's Very Scary': Local Businesses Prepare for Uncertain Months Ahead - hobokengirl.com

Aeryn Kennedy plays for Camdenton High School in 2019. (Photo courtesy of Aeryn Kennedy from D.L. Jones Photography.)

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Many first-years Division I athletes dont have the commitment to be both on the womens soccer team and a member of the ROTC program. But Marquettes midfielder/defender Aeryn Kennedy is an exception.

However, Kennedy is not the first student at Marquette to be involved in both programs.

Kristin Stoniecki, a 2007 graduate, was a part of the ROTC program as a student athlete.Stoniecki, a track and field athlete, transferred to Marquette her sophomore year, and holds multiple Marquette records in pole vaulting. She went on to be a White House nurse after graduating, and also won the 2020 Young Alumna of the Year Award.

Seeing another student athlete successfully taking part in the ROTC program has made Kennedy feel better about the commitment that is to come.

It makes me feel better, because that is one thing balancing time and scheduling. That definitely was a concern at first, Kennedy said. So far its going well.

Although no one in her family has been in the military, Kennedy said she has wanted to serve since high school.

It just seemed like a really great option. I love the Navy, and ships and engineering is what I want to do with my life, Kennedy said. It just seemed like something really interesting that Id want to do.

When choosing a school to commit to, Kennedy was looking for a soccer program that felt like home, as well as an ROTC program she could trust. The Camdenton, Missouri native said that Marquette checked off both of her boxes.

It had everything I wanted. It had it had good engineering program. It did have ROTC and a great soccer program and just athletics in general and I know I like the location (of Milwaukee), so it just seems like a really great fit, Kennedy said.

While she has not been on campus for long, Kennedy is already thought of highly of byboth her head coach Frank Pelaez andROTC advisor Lieutenant Jonathan Kappel.

Im really lucky that I get to know her, and thats where she really intrigues me, because shes got to be very disciplined and I love that, Pelaez said. I mean, you have to respect (being in ROTC and being an athlete) because not every kid will want to do that.

For Pelaez, this is new territory, as he has never had anyone in his program also be a part of ROTC. Along with Kennedy, he is also adjusting to the change.

He said he admires Kennedy, not just for her commitment to both the soccer program and ROTC, but also for how she already handles herself like she is in the military.

I think its funny because when I talk to her shes already pretending that she (is) in the military. Pelaez said.

Along with Pelaez, Kappel respects the attitude of the first-year from Camdenton, Missouri, despite only knowing her for a short period of time.

I can tell you that she is definitely a motivated character, Kappel said. She definitely (has) a passion for this right now.

Kappel mentioned Kennedy is a national scholarship student, going against students across the country to obtain this prestigious award. In order to win the award, the student must submit an application through Officer Recruiting Stations. From there, they are interviewed by a naval officer on why the want to be in NROTC and the military. They then go through various medical examinations to make sure the students meet the physical requirements for the scholarship. After this process, the application gets sent to a panel in the Great Lakes, who decides what students win this award. The scholarship process is very competitive, as just over 1,000 students win each year.

Although Kennedy is devastated that she is not in season, she is looking forward to adjusting to campus life and her ROTC schedule.

I feel like having this time right now to work through it and get a feel for things on campus will definitely help me later on, Kennedy said.

Having this time might be beneficial because right now as a midshipmen candidate, she is in the New Student Orientation, which calls for mornings starting as early as 5:30 a.m.In NSO, Kennedy is strictly around first-years for the first month of school as they are introduced to basic training.

Her daily schedule is packed with Marquette core classes, classes based on her major, NSO training and naval science classes that are required for all those in the ROTC program.

On Tuesday mornings, right now they are conducting from 5:30 in the morning to 7:00 oclock,and they have multi-instruction period basically,and thats held by the upperclassmen involved in NSO, as well as the marine staff, Kappel said about her schedule. They tend to do a little bit of outside, kind of basics and fundamentals of the military.

It does not stop there. Now, the womens soccer team has also started in-person small group practices.

Additionally, Kennedys entire Thursday morning and afternoon is reserved for specific military training.

On Thursday morning, we have something called PT, which is physical training, and they start at 5:30 and go till 7:00 in the morning, Kappel said. Thursday afternoons, from 3:30 to 5:30, we have reserved for something thats known on their schedules and courses as naval science lab, but for us we just refer to this as drill.

Kappel said drill involves more military training and general training, like sexual harassment training, and how they can keep and uphold the physical and mental standards in the military.

Although Kennedy is involved in two entirely different programs, she hopes she can take some of the skills that she learns from ROTC and bring them to the soccer field to elevate her game.

I definitely think that I can bring awareness, because in the military, you will learn different things, Kennedy said. Definitely physical fitness, and my strength.

At the end of September, Kennedy will graduate from NSO and officially become a midshipman. The real test will then begin and herr journey into the life in the military will begin.

This story was written by Kristin Parisi. She can be reached at kristin.parisi@marquette.edu or on Twitter @kristinparisimu.

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First-year soccer player takes on challenge of ROTC program - Marquette Wire

As I spent my childhood playing on the shores of the Clyde River in Scotland, I watched ships as they headed eastward to sea. Where were they headed? What lay at their destination?

I did not know that halfway around the world was another child harboring similar questions as he stood near the shipbuilding yards on the Columbia River in Vancouver. We two were destined to meet in Canada where we married more than 50 years ago.

Once our family was grown, our innate love of the water surfaced. Wed enjoyed recreational sailing on the Columbia River, and set our sights farther. After reading, taking appropriate classes and attending talks by others who lived the cruising lifestyle, John and I were ready to pursue our own retirement dream. We sold our home, packed our car and began a two-year sailboat search.

We found her in Texas, renamed her Pacific Rose and began our quest to find paradise.

One afternoon, under a cloudless blue sky, we anchored off Sand Dollar Beach by Georgetown, Bahamas. I stood at the bow, clearly seeing scattered wisps of green grass swaying on the white sand floor about 10 feet below. John was swimming along to check that the anchor was holding fast. Pacific Rose swayed gently with the current under the bright sunshine.

We planned to spend the afternoon tending to boat chores. Having raised the dinghy onto the deck, John was using a felt pen and letter template to refresh the registration numbers on each side of its bow. I was going to soak the dock lines, which had become soiled and salt-hardened during our travels.

John glanced across the deck, adjusting his eyes from the effects of the glaring sun to the shaded cockpit. It surprised him to see my derriere in the air, toes clutching the cockpit floor. The rest of me was slung over the edge of the starboard storage locker, my arms stretching downward into the space below.

My fingers almost reached the pail that rested on the floor of the locker. I was attempting to grasp the handle in order to lift it onto the deck so I could go ahead with soaking the lines.

Nan, for heavens sake, let me do that, shouted John, who is over a foot taller than me.

Its OK. I can reach it, I said.

But you cant, he said knowingly.

Yes, I can, was my assertive reply.

Confident and determined, I suddenly banged my elbow against the lever on the fire extinguisher attached to the side of the locker. Unbeknownst to us, the safety pin was not replaced when the extinguisher was last serviced. Before either of us could utter another word, the inanimate fire extinguisher spouted to life. It spewed forth a fine talc-like substance, covering everything stored in the locker: lines, pail, bosuns chair, tarp and miscellaneous marine equipment and supplies.

Of course, I was not immune. I grabbed the edge of the locker, pulled myself to standing position and turned to John with white face and prematurely white hair.

I guess I couldnt, I quipped.

We spent the rest of the afternoon emptying the storage locker, wiping down its walls and contents before neatly replacing each item. We were pleased about one thing: We knew the fire extinguisher worked. Now all we had to do was have it recharged at the marine supply store down island.

And so it went, one of our many adventures in paradise.

Everybody Has a Story welcomes nonfiction contributions, 1,000 words maximum, and relevant photographs. Send to: neighbors@columbian.com or P.O. Box 180, Vancouver WA, 98666. Call Everybody Has an Editor Scott Hewitt, 360-735-4525, with questions.

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Everybody Has a Story: They retired with two tickets to paradise - The Columbian

Uncharted territories are difficult to navigate, but what if you had the ability to do a test run for one of lifes most important milestones retirement? This pandemic has been just that in more ways than one.

Families, schools and businesses have been left feeling whiplashed by the efforts of government and officials as they close, re-open and re-close aspects or our economy and our daily lives. The global pandemic has tested our true grit on so many levels as a nation and economy.

It is also shining a spotlight on many of the areas where we have done a good job at preparing for retirement andsome areas that still need some work.

As the saying goes, the show must go on. The good news is if youre not retired yet, then theres still time to make some changes.

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You may be finding yourself working on various home projects, taking on new hobbies, or reviving old ones during the lockdown. What has been your experience? Maybe the initial thought of a wide-open schedule and an unplanned day sounded exciting, but it turned out to be unfulfilling and boring. Or maybe it was heaven.

Figuring out what to do with all the extra time youll have during retirement to live a purposeful and meaningful life is just as important as figuring out how youll allocate your money.

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As a result of the shutdowns and stay-at-home orders, families and loved ones had nowhere to go and were forced to spend more time together. This presented a unique opportunity for families to find meaningful engagements in relationships that were often pushed aside or hurried as a result of everyday life demands. On the flip side, coronavirus has amplified problems between some couples as theyve been stuck in close quarters and forced to confront compatibility issues and navigate the unique problems of the pandemic. In fact, divorce rates have skyrocketed amid coronavirus, and 31% of couples admitted the lockdown has caused irreparable damage to their relationships.

Stress levels will hopefully not be as high during retirement as they are now, but couples should similarly expect more time spent together and garner a sense of what that means for their future whether positive or negative.

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With the economy shut down and many areas faced with stay-at-home orders, weve been forced to hunker down and focus on what we need to survive. The common epiphany shared by many is that, well we dont really need all that much. You probably noticed that besides food, housing and utility costs, there wasnt much else you needed.

If you were lucky enough to transition to telework, your transportation costs likely declined. And shopping for business attire and dry-cleaning bills? Those costs likely plummeted as well. There are expenses that may well increase in retirement like medical bills so take this time to note how your spending has changed throughout the pandemic. It should give you a good indication of what you really might need to get by in retirement.

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This pandemic has also highlighted more than ever the importance of having a cash cushion for emergencies. When an unforeseen expense occurs, its best to have three to six months worth of expenses in a liquid account. This is no different during retirement.

Its especially helpful to have a cash cushion when your investment accounts take a dip and youre best off pausing distributions from these accounts. Being dynamic with your distributions and temporarily bridging expenses from savings will allow your portfolio time to recover.

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Whether youre furloughed, searching for employment or are a business owner re-working your strategy, youve probably been forced to look at how long you can manage all your bills, given how much you currently have. Although not an exact science, calculating your retirement is much like that.

Regardless of whether youre living off a 401(k), pension, Social Security and/or investment income in retirement, youll need to weigh your current investment income plus expected future income against your annual expenses.

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If youre nearing retirement, this last bout of market volatility probably made you acutely aware of how market shocks can impact your carefully laid-out plans. It likely also underscored the importance of managing risk as you get closer to retirement.

Luckily, weve seen a rapid recovery in the markets this time but take this opportunity to revisit your portfolio allocation to make sure that your risk is aligned with your goals and time horizon. Sometimes there are no second (or third) chances.

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Being flexible and able to adapt to the worlds uncertainties is always a great strategy. Having the ability to pivot and re-tool their finances is helping individuals, families and businesses survive right now. Everyones path to retirement looks different. But a test run is one thing that will certainly help you run the show as you get closer to that date.

Wealth Adviser, Halbert Hargrove

Julia Pham joined Halbert Hargrove as a Wealth Adviser in 2015. Her role includes encouraging HH clients to explore and fine-tune their aspirations and working with them to create a road map to attain the goals that matter to them. Julia has worked in financial services since 2007. Julia earned a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude in Economics and Sociology, and an MBA, both from the University of California at Irvine.

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6 Ways the Pandemic Has Been a Dress Rehearsal for Retirement and How You Can Take Advantage - Kiplinger's Personal Finance

The specialist knows very well his own tiny corner of the universe; he is radically ignorant of all the rest.-Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930)

It has been almost one hundred years since Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset published The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas, 1930). A prescient indictment of anti-Reason, and an immediate forerunner of modern classical works by German scholars Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers,[1] Ortega was most plainly concerned about Europes growing fragmentation of learning. Witnessing a world rapidly abandoning the traditional goal of broadly-educated or whole human beings, he worried about a future in which there would be more capable scientists than ever before, but where these scientists were otherwise unexceptional and without any wider embrace of erudition.

These observations were seminal. Among other things, the prophetic philosopher foresaw educated societies in which even the proud holders of impressive university degrees were conscientiously ignorant of everything outside their own vocational bailiwicks. In essence, Ortega had anticipated the present-day United States. Here, even in an oft-vaunted advanced society, the most exquisitely trained physicians, lawyers, accountants and engineers generally reason at the same limiting level of analysis as technicians, carpenters or lightly schooled office workers.

In large part, this is because professional education in the United States has effectively superseded everything that does not ostentatiously focus on making money. The adverb here is vital in this description, because the overriding lure of wealth in America remains the presumed admiration it can elicit from others. As we ought already to have learned from Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world.At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him.[2]

Almost by definition, any American concerns for intellectual or historical issues per se have become extraneous. This does not mean, however, that our strenuous national efforts at improving professional education have been successful or productive. On the contrary, as we witness the multiple daily technical failures of American democracy e.g. the all-too evident incapacity of our ballot calculating technologies to keep abreast of shifting vote-counting modalities this beleaguered polity is failing on multiple fronts.

For many reasons, many of them overlapping, this has been a lamentable retrogression. Above all, it has impaired this countrys capacity to sustain an enviable or even minimally credible democracy. Though Thomas Jefferson had already understood that proper human governance requires a purposeful acquaintance with historical and sociological learning, Americans now inhabit a country where the president can say unashamedly, I love the poorly educated. Significantly, this perverse preference of Donald J. Trump did not emerge ex nihilo, out of nothing.

It is a portentous but credible echo of Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: Intellect rots the brain.[3]

Ortega yGasset had a specific name for this generally defiling intellectual deformation. More exactly, he called it The Barbarism of Specialisation.[4] Earlier, and in somewhat similar fashion, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the educated philistine.[5] Both Ortega and Nietzsche recognized the irony that a society could become progressively better educated in various sub-fields of human knowledge and yet, simultaneously, become less and less cultured, less and less truly civilized.[6] In this regard, the German philosopher placed appropriate conceptual blame on what he preferred to call the herd.[7] For his part, the kindred Spanish thinker cast his particular indictment on the mass.

Whatever the terminological differences, both sets of ideas were centered on the same basic critique; that is, that individuals had been casting aside the necessary obligation to think for themselves, and had, thereby, surrendered indispensable analytic judgments to crowds.[8]

Today, both ideas can shed some useful light on American democracy, a system of governance under increasing assault by US President Donald J. Trump. To the extent that American education has become rampantly vocational that is, oriented toward more and more pragmatic kinds of specialization the wisdom of Ortega yGasset and others is worth probing with ever-increasing care. Moreover, the corrosively barbarous impact of specialization foreseen earlier by philosophers is now magnified by the injurious effects of worldwide disease pandemic.

Without doubt, this unwelcome magnification will need to be countered if American democracy is able merely to survive.[9]

But analysis should begin at the beginning. Inter alia, it is a discomfiting beginning. Americans now inhabit a society so numbingly fragmented and rancorous that even their most sincere melancholy is seemingly contrived. Wallowing in the mutually-reinforcing twilights of submission and conformance, We the people have strayed dangerously far from any meaningful standards of serious learning. In consequence, though still a nation with extraordinary scientific, medical and commercial successes, the American public is often ill-equipped to judge candidates for high political office.[10]

As we have seen, utterly ill-equipped.

Surveying ever-mounting damages of the Trump presidency,[11] some of which are synergistic or force multiplying, could anything be more apparent?

The grievously baneful selection of Donald J. Trump in 2016 was anything but a cultural aberration. It was, rather, the plausible outcome of an electorate relentlessly driven and even defined by mass. Without any real or compelling reasons, voting Americans freely abandoned the once-residual elements of Jeffersonian good citizenship.

Together with the unceasing connivance of assorted criminals, charlatans and fools, many of them occupants of the present US Governments most senior positions, a lonely American mass now bears core responsibility for allowing the demise of a once- enviable democratic ethos. To expect any sudden improvements to emerge from among this homogenized mass (e.g., by continuously making the citizens more particularly aware of this presidents manifold derelictions) would be to overestimate its inclinations. Though truth is always exculpatory, there are times when it yields to various forms of self-delusion.

What the mass once learned to believe without reasons, queries Nietzsches Zarathustra, who could ever overthrow with reasons?

There will be a heavy price to pay for Americas still-expanding ascendancy of mass. Any society so willing to abjure its rudimentary obligations toward dignified learning toward what American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had once called high thinking is one that should never reasonably expect to survive.[12]

There is more. Treating formal education as a narrowly instrumental obligation (one should get better educated in order to get a better paying job), Americans now more easily accept flagrantly empty witticisms as profundities (We will build a beautiful wall; Barbed wire can be beautiful; The moon is part of Mars; Testing for corona virus only increases disease; Just one percent of Covid19 victims have symptoms, etc., etc), and consult genuinely challenging ideas only rarely.

Always, the dire result of anti-Reason is more-or-less predictable; that is, a finely trained work force that manages to get a particular job done, but displays (simultaneously) nary a hint of worthwhile learning, commendable human understanding or simple compassion. Concerning this last absence, empathy is not directly related to the barbarisms of specialization, but it does generally exhibit some tangible nurturance from literature, art and/or culture. Incontestably, the Trump White House is not only indifferent to basic human rights and public welfare,[13] it quite literally elevates personal animus to highest possible significations.

This is especially marked where such animus is most thoroughly pedestrian.

Intentionally mispronouncing the Democrat vice-presidential candidates first name is a small but glaring example of Donald Trumps selected level of competitive political discourse. By its very nature, of course, this demeaning level is better suited to a first-grade elementary school classroom.

There are even much wider ramifications of gratuitous rancor. When transposed to the vital arena of international relations, this presidents elevation of belligerent nationalism has a long and persistently unsuccessful history as Realpolitik or power politics.[14] Thinking himself clever, Donald Trump champions America First (the phrase resonates with those, like the president himself, who have no knowledge of history),but fails to realize that this peculiarly shameful resurrection of Deutschland uber alles can lead only to massive defeat and unparalleled despair.

I loathe, therefore I am, could well become Donald J. Trumps revised version of Ren Descartes Cogito.[15] Following Descartes, Sigmund Freud had understood that all human beings could somehow be motivated toward creating a spontaneous sympathy of souls, but Americas Donald Trump has quite expansively reversed this objective. Reinforced by the rampant vocationalism of this countrys education system, Trump has consistently urged citizens to turn against one another, and for no dignified, defensible or science-based reasons. In absolutely all cases, these grotesque urgings have had no meritorious or higher purpose.

Instead, they remain utterly and viciously contrived.

In the bitterly fractionated Trump-era United States, an authentic American individualhas become little more than a charming artifact. Among other things, the nations societal mass, more refractory than ever to intellect and learning, still displays no discernible intentions of ever taking itself seriously. To the contrary, an embittered American mass now marches in deferential lockstep, foolishly, without thought, toward even-greater patterns of imitation, unhappiness and starkly belligerent incivility.

All things considered, the American future is not hard to fathom. More than likely, whatever might be decided in upcoming politics and elections, Americans will continue to be carried forth not by any commendable nobilities of principle or purpose, but by steady eruptions of personal and collective agitation, by endlessly inane presidential repetitions and by the perpetually demeaning primacy of a duly sanctified public ignorance. At times, perhaps, We the people may still be able to slow down a bit and smell the roses, but this is doubtful.

Plainly, our visibly compromised and degraded country now imposes upon its increasingly exhausted people the breathless rhythms of a vast and omnivorous machine.

This machine has no objective other than to keep struggling without spawning any sudden breakdowns or prematurely inconvenient deaths.

Much as many might wish to deny it, the plausible end of this self-destroying machinery will be to prevent Americans from remembering who they are now and (far more importantly) who they might once still have become. At another reasonable level of concern, Americans remain threatened by nuclear war and nuclear terrorism, especially now, during the incoherent Trump-era. Significantly, although there exists a vast literature on law-based strategies of nuclear war avoidance, there is little parallel jurisprudential effort directed toward the prevention of nuclear terrorism.[16]

In fact, presidential banalities aside, this is no longer a nation of laws. It is a nation of ad hoc, narrowly visceral response.

There is more. Americans inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once, we harbored a preciously unique potential to nurture individuals, that is, to encourage Americans to become more than a smugly inert mass, herd or crowd. Then, Ralph Waldo Emerson (also fellow Transcendentalists Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau) described us optimistically as a people animated by industry and self-reliance.

Now, however, and beyond any serious contestation, we are stymied by collective paralysis, capitulation and a starkly Kierkegaardian fear and trembling.

Surely, as all must eventually acknowledge, there is more to this chanting country than Fuehrer-driven rallies, tsunamis of hyper-adrenalized commerce or gargantuan waves of abundantly cheap entertainments: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, rhapsodized the poet Walt Whitman, but today, the American Selfhas devolved into a delicately thin shadow of true national potential. Distressingly, this Self has already become a twisting reflection of a prior authenticity. Now it is under seemingly final assault by a far-reaching societal tastelessness and by a literally epidemic gluttony.

Regarding this expressly gastronomic debility, its not that we Americans have become more and more hungry, but rather that we have lost any once residual appetites for real life.[17]

In the end, credulity is Americas worst enemy. The stubborn inclination to believe that wider social and personal redemption must lie somewhere in politics remains a potentially fatal disorder. To be fair, various social and economic issues do need to be coherently addressed by Americas political representatives, but so too must the nations deeper problems first be solved at the level of microcosm, as a matter for individuals.

In the end, American politics like politics everywhere must remain a second-order activity, a faint reflection of what is truly important. For now, it continues to thrive upon a vast personal emptiness, on an infirmity that is the always-defiling reciprocal of any genuine personal fulfillment. Conscious of his emptiness, warns the German philosopher Karl Jaspers in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), man (human) tries to make a faith for himself (or herself) in the political realm. In Vain.

Even in an authentic democracy, only a few can ever hope to redeem themselves and the wider American nation, but these self-effacing souls will generally remain silent, hidden in more-or-less deep cover, often even from themselves. In a democracy where education is oriented toward narrowly vocational forms of career preparation, an orientation toward barbaric specialization, these residual few can expect to be suffocated by the many. Unsurprisingly, such asphyxiation, in absolutely any of its conceivable particularities, would be a bad way to die.[18]

Donald J. Trump did not emerge on the political scene ex nihilo, out of nothing. His incoherent and disjointed presidency is the direct result of a society that has wittingly and barbarously abandoned all serious thought. When such a society no longer asks the big philosophical questions for example, What is the good in government and politics? or How do I lead a good life as person and citizen? or How can I best nurture the well-being of other human beings? the lamentable outcome is inevitable. It is an outcome that we are currently living through in the United States, and one that might sometime have to be died through.

Going forward, what we ought to fear most of all is precisely this continuously self-defiling outcome, not a particular electoral result. To be certain, at this point, nothing could be more urgently important for the United States than to rid itself of the intersecting pathologies of Covid19 and Donald Trump, diseases that are mutually reinforcing and potentially synergistic, but even such victories would only be transient. More fundamentally, recalling philosopher Jose Ortega yGassets timeless warning about the barbarism of specialisation, this country must resurrect an earlier ethos of education in which learning benefits the whole human being, not just a work-related corner of the universe.

Also vital is the obligation to acknowledge the fundamental interrelatedness of all peoples and the binding universality of international law.[19]

To survive, both as a nation and as individuals, Americans need to become educated not merely as well-trained cogs in the vast industrial machine, but as empathetic and caring citizens. Everyone is the other, and no one is just himself, cautions Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (1932), but this elementary lesson once discoverable in myriad sacred texts is not easily operationalized. Indeed, it is in this single monumental failure of operationalization that human civilization has most conspicuously failed though the ages. To wit, in Trump-era American democracy, the presidents core message is not about the co-responsibility of every human being for his or her fellows, but about winners, losers, and a presumptively preeminent citizen obligation to Make America Great.

In this Trumpian context, greatness assumes a crudely Darwinian or zero-sum condition, and not one wherein each individual favors harmonious cooperation over an endlessly belligerent competition.[20]

How shall we finally change all this, or, recalling Platos wisdom in The Republic, how shall we learn to make the souls of the citizens better?[21] This is not a question that we can answer with any pertinent detail before the upcoming US presidential election. But it is still a question that we ought to put before the imperiled American polity soon, and sometime before it is too late.[22]

American democracy faces multiple hazards, including Ortega y Gassets barbarism of specialisation. To be rescued in time, each hazard will have to be tackled carefully, by itself and also in coordinated tandem with all other identifiable perils. Overall, the task will be daunting and overwhelming, but the alternative is simply no longer tolerable or sustainable.

Donald Trumps removal from office is a sine qua non for all applicable remedies, but even such an needed step would target only a catastrophic symptom of Americas national pathology. By itself, saving the United States from Donald Trump would surely be indispensable, but it would leave unchanged the countrys still most deeply underlying disease. In the end,[23] because Americans will need to bring a less specialized form of learning to their citizenship responsibilities, the nation will quickly have to figure out practical ways of restoring educational wholeness.

Can this sort of rational calculation be expected? Maybe not. Perhaps, like the timeless message of Nietzsches Zarathustra, this warning has come too soon. If that turns out to be the case, there may simply be no later.

[1] See especially Martin Heideggers Being and Time (Sein und Zeit;1953) and Karl Jaspers Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952). Is it an end that draws near, inquires Jaspers, or a beginning? The answer will depend, in large part, on what Heidegger has to say about the Jungian or Freudian mass. In Being and Time (1953), the philosopher laments what he calls, in German, das Mann, or The They. Drawing fruitfully upon earlier core insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heideggers The They represents the ever-present and interchangeable herd, crowd, horde or mass. Each such conglomerate exhibits untruth (the term actually favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) because it can encourage the barbarism of specialisation and suffocate broadly humanistic kinds of learning.

[2]Smith published Theory seventeen years before his vastly more famous and oft-cited Wealth of Nations (1776).

[3]See, on commonalities between Third Reich and Trump-era American democracy, by Louis Ren Beres at Jurist: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/05/louis-beres-america-rise-and-fall/

[4] Chapter 12 of The Revolt of the Masses (1930) is expressly titled The Barbarism of Specialisation.'

[5]Here, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche coined an aptly specific term, one he hoped could eventually become universal. This German word was Bildungsphilister. When expressed in its most lucid and coherent English translation, it means educated Philistine. Bildungsphilister is a term that could shed useful light upon Donald Trumps ongoing support from among Americas presumptively well-educated and well-to-do.

[6] On this irony, Kierkegaard says it best in The Sickness Unto Death (1849): Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience, as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs.Philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility.it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, and shows it off.

[7]Sigmund Freud introduced his own particular version of Nietzsches herd, which was horde. Interestingly, Freud maintained a general antipathy to all things American. He most strenuously objected, according to Bruno Bettelheim, to this countrys shallow optimism and also its corollary commitment to the crudest forms of materialism. America, thought Freud, was grievously lacking in soul. See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Mans Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.

[8] In essence, the crowd was Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaards equivalent of Nietzsches herd and Ortegas mass.

[9] The most ominous synergies of barbarism would link pandemic effects with growing risks of a nuclear war. On irrational nuclear decision-making by this author, see Louis Ren Beres, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/ See also, by Professor Beres, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making/ (Pentagon). For authoritative early accounts by Professor Beres of nuclear war expected effects, see: Louis Ren Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis Ren Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: Americas Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis Ren Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis Ren Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israels Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israels Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy

[10] At a minimum, in this regard, the US public ought to be reminded of the explicit warning in Nietzsches Zarathustra: Do not ever seek the higher man at the market place. (Moreover, it would not be unfair to Nietzsches core meaning here to expand higher man to mean higher person.).

[11] Most egregious, in any assessment of these damages, is this presidents wilful subordination of national interest to his own presumed private interests. In this regard, one may suitably recall Sophocles cautionary speech of Creon in Antigone: I hold despicable, and always have.anyone who puts his own popularity before his country.

[12] Still the best treatments of Americas long-term disinterest in anything intellectual are Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964); and Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1959).

[13] See, by Louis Ren Beres: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/04/the-trump-presidency-a-breathtaking-assault-on-law-justice-and-security/

[14] The classic statement of Realpolitik or power politics in western philosophy is the comment of Thrasymachus in Platos Republic : Justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger. (See Plato, The Republic, 29, Benjamin Jowett, tr., World Publishing Company, 1946.) See also: Ciceros oft-quoted query: For what can be done against force without force?, Marcus Tullus Cicero, Ciceros Letters to his Friends, 78 (D.R. Shackleton Baily tr., Scholars Press, 1988).

[15] I think, therefore I am, says Ren Descartes, in his Discourse on Method (1637). Reciprocally, in his modern classic essay on Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre observes that outside the Cartesian cogito, all views are only probable.

[16] See, by Professor Louis Ren Beres: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1410&context=gjicl

[17] An apt literary reference for this condition of lost appetite is Franz Kafkas story, The Hunger Artist.

[18] In more expressly concrete terms, average American life-expectancy, unenviable for several decades, has now fallen behind most of the advanced industrial world. While Trump boasts of a wall to keep out Mexicans and assorted others, more and more Americans are trying to cross in the other direction.

[19] Apropos of this universality, international law is generally part of the law of the United States. These legal systems are always interpenetrating. Declared Mr. Justice Gray, in delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction. (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)). The specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called Supremacy Clause.

[20] Here it could be helpful to recall the words of French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man: The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself is false and against nature.

[21] Long after Plato, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of soul (in German, Seele) as the very essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provides a precise definition of the term, but clearly it was not intended by either in any ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of both mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in the present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by various express references to soul. Freud was plainly disgusted by any civilization so apparently unmoved by considerations of true consciousness (e.g., awareness of intellect and literature), and even thought that the crude American commitment to perpetually shallow optimism and to material accomplishment at any cost would occasion sweeping psychological misery.

[22] Sometimes, says Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, the worst does happen.

[23] In the end, says Goethe, we are always creatures of our own making.

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American Democracy and "The Barbarism of Specialisation" - Modern Diplomacy

The specialist knows very well his own tiny corner of the universe; he is radically ignorant of all the rest.-Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930)

It has been almost one hundred years since Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset published The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas, 1930). A prescient indictment of anti-Reason, and an immediate forerunner of modern classical works by German scholars Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers,[1] Ortega was most plainly concerned about Europes growing fragmentation of learning. Witnessing a world rapidly abandoning the traditional goal of broadly-educated or whole human beings, he worried about a future in which there would be more capable scientists than ever before, but where these scientists were otherwise unexceptional and without any wider embrace of erudition.

These observations were seminal. Among other things, the prophetic philosopher foresaw educated societies in which even the proud holders of impressive university degrees were conscientiously ignorant of everything outside their own vocational bailiwicks. In essence, Ortega had anticipated the present-day United States. Here, even in an oft-vaunted advanced society, the most exquisitely trained physicians, lawyers, accountants and engineers generally reason at the same limiting level of analysis as technicians, carpenters or lightly schooled office workers.

In large part, this is because professional education in the United States has effectively superseded everything that does not ostentatiously focus on making money. The adverb here is vital in this description, because the overriding lure of wealth in America remains the presumed admiration it can elicit from others. As we ought already to have learned from Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world.At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him.[2]

Almost by definition, any American concerns for intellectual or historical issues per se have become extraneous. This does not mean, however, that our strenuous national efforts at improving professional education have been successful or productive. On the contrary, as we witness the multiple daily technical failures of American democracy e.g. the all-too evident incapacity of our ballot calculating technologies to keep abreast of shifting vote-counting modalities this beleaguered polity is failing on multiple fronts.

For many reasons, many of them overlapping, this has been a lamentable retrogression. Above all, it has impaired this countrys capacity to sustain an enviable or even minimally credible democracy. Though Thomas Jefferson had already understood that proper human governance requires a purposeful acquaintance with historical and sociological learning, Americans now inhabit a country where the president can say unashamedly, I love the poorly educated. Significantly, this perverse preference of Donald J. Trump did not emerge ex nihilo, out of nothing.

It is a portentous but credible echo of Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: Intellect rots the brain.[3]

Ortega yGasset had a specific name for this generally defiling intellectual deformation. More exactly, he called it The Barbarism of Specialisation.[4] Earlier, and in somewhat similar fashion, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the educated philistine.[5] Both Ortega and Nietzsche recognized the irony that a society could become progressively better educated in various sub-fields of human knowledge and yet, simultaneously, become less and less cultured, less and less truly civilized.[6] In this regard, the German philosopher placed appropriate conceptual blame on what he preferred to call the herd.[7] For his part, the kindred Spanish thinker cast his particular indictment on the mass.

Whatever the terminological differences, both sets of ideas were centered on the same basic critique; that is, that individuals had been casting aside the necessary obligation to think for themselves, and had, thereby, surrendered indispensable analytic judgments to crowds.[8]

Today, both ideas can shed some useful light on American democracy, a system of governance under increasing assault by US President Donald J. Trump. To the extent that American education has become rampantly vocational that is, oriented toward more and more pragmatic kinds of specialization the wisdom of Ortega yGasset and others is worth probing with ever-increasing care. Moreover, the corrosively barbarous impact of specialization foreseen earlier by philosophers is now magnified by the injurious effects of worldwide disease pandemic.

Without doubt, this unwelcome magnification will need to be countered if American democracy is able merely to survive.[9]

But analysis should begin at the beginning. Inter alia, it is a discomfiting beginning. Americans now inhabit a society so numbingly fragmented and rancorous that even their most sincere melancholy is seemingly contrived. Wallowing in the mutually-reinforcing twilights of submission and conformance, We the people have strayed dangerously far from any meaningful standards of serious learning. In consequence, though still a nation with extraordinary scientific, medical and commercial successes, the American public is often ill-equipped to judge candidates for high political office.[10]

As we have seen, utterly ill-equipped.

Surveying ever-mounting damages of the Trump presidency,[11] some of which are synergistic or force multiplying, could anything be more apparent?

The grievously baneful selection of Donald J. Trump in 2016 was anything but a cultural aberration. It was, rather, the plausible outcome of an electorate relentlessly driven and even defined by mass. Without any real or compelling reasons, voting Americans freely abandoned the once-residual elements of Jeffersonian good citizenship.

Together with the unceasing connivance of assorted criminals, charlatans and fools, many of them occupants of the present US Governments most senior positions, a lonely American mass now bears core responsibility for allowing the demise of a once- enviable democratic ethos. To expect any sudden improvements to emerge from among this homogenized mass (e.g., by continuously making the citizens more particularly aware of this presidents manifold derelictions) would be to overestimate its inclinations. Though truth is always exculpatory, there are times when it yields to various forms of self-delusion.

What the mass once learned to believe without reasons, queries Nietzsches Zarathustra, who could ever overthrow with reasons?

There will be a heavy price to pay for Americas still-expanding ascendancy of mass. Any society so willing to abjure its rudimentary obligations toward dignified learning toward what American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had once called high thinking is one that should never reasonably expect to survive.[12]

There is more. Treating formal education as a narrowly instrumental obligation (one should get better educated in order to get a better paying job), Americans now more easily accept flagrantly empty witticisms as profundities (We will build a beautiful wall; Barbed wire can be beautiful; The moon is part of Mars; Testing for corona virus only increases disease; Just one percent of Covid19 victims have symptoms, etc., etc), and consult genuinely challenging ideas only rarely.

Always, the dire result of anti-Reason is more-or-less predictable; that is, a finely trained work force that manages to get a particular job done, but displays (simultaneously) nary a hint of worthwhile learning, commendable human understanding or simple compassion. Concerning this last absence, empathy is not directly related to the barbarisms of specialization, but it does generally exhibit some tangible nurturance from literature, art and/or culture. Incontestably, the Trump White House is not only indifferent to basic human rights and public welfare,[13] it quite literally elevates personal animus to highest possible significations.

This is especially marked where such animus is most thoroughly pedestrian.

Intentionally mispronouncing the Democrat vice-presidential candidates first name is a small but glaring example of Donald Trumps selected level of competitive political discourse. By its very nature, of course, this demeaning level is better suited to a first-grade elementary school classroom.

There are even much wider ramifications of gratuitous rancor. When transposed to the vital arena of international relations, this presidents elevation of belligerent nationalism has a long and persistently unsuccessful history as Realpolitik or power politics.[14] Thinking himself clever, Donald Trump champions America First (the phrase resonates with those, like the president himself, who have no knowledge of history),but fails to realize that this peculiarly shameful resurrection of Deutschland uber alles can lead only to massive defeat and unparalleled despair.

I loathe, therefore I am, could well become Donald J. Trumps revised version of Ren Descartes Cogito.[15] Following Descartes, Sigmund Freud had understood that all human beings could somehow be motivated toward creating a spontaneous sympathy of souls, but Americas Donald Trump has quite expansively reversed this objective. Reinforced by the rampant vocationalism of this countrys education system, Trump has consistently urged citizens to turn against one another, and for no dignified, defensible or science-based reasons. In absolutely all cases, these grotesque urgings have had no meritorious or higher purpose.

Instead, they remain utterly and viciously contrived.

In the bitterly fractionated Trump-era United States, an authentic American individualhas become little more than a charming artifact. Among other things, the nations societal mass, more refractory than ever to intellect and learning, still displays no discernible intentions of ever taking itself seriously. To the contrary, an embittered American mass now marches in deferential lockstep, foolishly, without thought, toward even-greater patterns of imitation, unhappiness and starkly belligerent incivility.

All things considered, the American future is not hard to fathom. More than likely, whatever might be decided in upcoming politics and elections, Americans will continue to be carried forth not by any commendable nobilities of principle or purpose, but by steady eruptions of personal and collective agitation, by endlessly inane presidential repetitions and by the perpetually demeaning primacy of a duly sanctified public ignorance. At times, perhaps, We the people may still be able to slow down a bit and smell the roses, but this is doubtful.

Plainly, our visibly compromised and degraded country now imposes upon its increasingly exhausted people the breathless rhythms of a vast and omnivorous machine.

This machine has no objective other than to keep struggling without spawning any sudden breakdowns or prematurely inconvenient deaths.

Much as many might wish to deny it, the plausible end of this self-destroying machinery will be to prevent Americans from remembering who they are now and (far more importantly) who they might once still have become. At another reasonable level of concern, Americans remain threatened by nuclear war and nuclear terrorism, especially now, during the incoherent Trump-era. Significantly, although there exists a vast literature on law-based strategies of nuclear war avoidance, there is little parallel jurisprudential effort directed toward the prevention of nuclear terrorism.[16]

In fact, presidential banalities aside, this is no longer a nation of laws. It is a nation of ad hoc, narrowly visceral response.

There is more. Americans inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once, we harbored a preciously unique potential to nurture individuals, that is, to encourage Americans to become more than a smugly inert mass, herd or crowd. Then, Ralph Waldo Emerson (also fellow Transcendentalists Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau) described us optimistically as a people animated by industry and self-reliance.

Now, however, and beyond any serious contestation, we are stymied by collective paralysis, capitulation and a starkly Kierkegaardian fear and trembling.

Surely, as all must eventually acknowledge, there is more to this chanting country than Fuehrer-driven rallies, tsunamis of hyper-adrenalized commerce or gargantuan waves of abundantly cheap entertainments: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, rhapsodized the poet Walt Whitman, but today, the American Selfhas devolved into a delicately thin shadow of true national potential. Distressingly, this Self has already become a twisting reflection of a prior authenticity. Now it is under seemingly final assault by a far-reaching societal tastelessness and by a literally epidemic gluttony.

Regarding this expressly gastronomic debility, its not that we Americans have become more and more hungry, but rather that we have lost any once residual appetites for real life.[17]

In the end, credulity is Americas worst enemy. The stubborn inclination to believe that wider social and personal redemption must lie somewhere in politics remains a potentially fatal disorder. To be fair, various social and economic issues do need to be coherently addressed by Americas political representatives, but so too must the nations deeper problems first be solved at the level of microcosm, as a matter for individuals.

In the end, American politics like politics everywhere must remain a second-order activity, a faint reflection of what is truly important. For now, it continues to thrive upon a vast personal emptiness, on an infirmity that is the always-defiling reciprocal of any genuine personal fulfillment. Conscious of his emptiness, warns the German philosopher Karl Jaspers in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), man (human) tries to make a faith for himself (or herself) in the political realm. In Vain.

Even in an authentic democracy, only a few can ever hope to redeem themselves and the wider American nation, but these self-effacing souls will generally remain silent, hidden in more-or-less deep cover, often even from themselves. In a democracy where education is oriented toward narrowly vocational forms of career preparation, an orientation toward barbaric specialization, these residual few can expect to be suffocated by the many. Unsurprisingly, such asphyxiation, in absolutely any of its conceivable particularities, would be a bad way to die.[18]

Donald J. Trump did not emerge on the political scene ex nihilo, out of nothing. His incoherent and disjointed presidency is the direct result of a society that has wittingly and barbarously abandoned all serious thought. When such a society no longer asks the big philosophical questions for example, What is the good in government and politics? or How do I lead a good life as person and citizen? or How can I best nurture the well-being of other human beings? the lamentable outcome is inevitable. It is an outcome that we are currently living through in the United States, and one that might sometime have to be died through.

Going forward, what we ought to fear most of all is precisely this continuously self-defiling outcome, not a particular electoral result. To be certain, at this point, nothing could be more urgently important for the United States than to rid itself of the intersecting pathologies of Covid19 and Donald Trump, diseases that are mutually reinforcing and potentially synergistic, but even such victories would only be transient. More fundamentally, recalling philosopher Jose Ortega yGassets timeless warning about the barbarism of specialisation, this country must resurrect an earlier ethos of education in which learning benefits the whole human being, not just a work-related corner of the universe.

Also vital is the obligation to acknowledge the fundamental interrelatedness of all peoples and the binding universality of international law.[19]

To survive, both as a nation and as individuals, Americans need to become educated not merely as well-trained cogs in the vast industrial machine, but as empathetic and caring citizens. Everyone is the other, and no one is just himself, cautions Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (1932), but this elementary lesson once discoverable in myriad sacred texts is not easily operationalized. Indeed, it is in this single monumental failure of operationalization that human civilization has most conspicuously failed though the ages. To wit, in Trump-era American democracy, the presidents core message is not about the co-responsibility of every human being for his or her fellows, but about winners, losers, and a presumptively preeminent citizen obligation to Make America Great.

In this Trumpian context, greatness assumes a crudely Darwinian or zero-sum condition, and not one wherein each individual favors harmonious cooperation over an endlessly belligerent competition.[20]

How shall we finally change all this, or, recalling Platos wisdom in The Republic, how shall we learn to make the souls of the citizens better?[21] This is not a question that we can answer with any pertinent detail before the upcoming US presidential election. But it is still a question that we ought to put before the imperiled American polity soon, and sometime before it is too late.[22]

American democracy faces multiple hazards, including Ortega y Gassets barbarism of specialisation. To be rescued in time, each hazard will have to be tackled carefully, by itself and also in coordinated tandem with all other identifiable perils. Overall, the task will be daunting and overwhelming, but the alternative is simply no longer tolerable or sustainable.

Donald Trumps removal from office is a sine qua non for all applicable remedies, but even such an needed step would target only a catastrophic symptom of Americas national pathology. By itself, saving the United States from Donald Trump would surely be indispensable, but it would leave unchanged the countrys still most deeply underlying disease. In the end,[23] because Americans will need to bring a less specialized form of learning to their citizenship responsibilities, the nation will quickly have to figure out practical ways of restoring educational wholeness.

Can this sort of rational calculation be expected? Maybe not. Perhaps, like the timeless message of Nietzsches Zarathustra, this warning has come too soon. If that turns out to be the case, there may simply be no later.

[1] See especially Martin Heideggers Being and Time (Sein und Zeit;1953) and Karl Jaspers Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952). Is it an end that draws near, inquires Jaspers, or a beginning? The answer will depend, in large part, on what Heidegger has to say about the Jungian or Freudian mass. In Being and Time (1953), the philosopher laments what he calls, in German, das Mann, or The They. Drawing fruitfully upon earlier core insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heideggers The They represents the ever-present and interchangeable herd, crowd, horde or mass. Each such conglomerate exhibits untruth (the term actually favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) because it can encourage the barbarism of specialisation and suffocate broadly humanistic kinds of learning.

[2]Smith published Theory seventeen years before his vastly more famous and oft-cited Wealth of Nations (1776).

[3]See, on commonalities between Third Reich and Trump-era American democracy, by Louis Ren Beres at Jurist: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/05/louis-beres-america-rise-and-fall/

[4] Chapter 12 of The Revolt of the Masses (1930) is expressly titled The Barbarism of Specialisation.'

[5]Here, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche coined an aptly specific term, one he hoped could eventually become universal. This German word was Bildungsphilister. When expressed in its most lucid and coherent English translation, it means educated Philistine. Bildungsphilister is a term that could shed useful light upon Donald Trumps ongoing support from among Americas presumptively well-educated and well-to-do.

[6] On this irony, Kierkegaard says it best in The Sickness Unto Death (1849): Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience, as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs.Philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility.it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, and shows it off.

[7]Sigmund Freud introduced his own particular version of Nietzsches herd, which was horde. Interestingly, Freud maintained a general antipathy to all things American. He most strenuously objected, according to Bruno Bettelheim, to this countrys shallow optimism and also its corollary commitment to the crudest forms of materialism. America, thought Freud, was grievously lacking in soul. See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Mans Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.

[8] In essence, the crowd was Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaards equivalent of Nietzsches herd and Ortegas mass.

[9] The most ominous synergies of barbarism would link pandemic effects with growing risks of a nuclear war. On irrational nuclear decision-making by this author, see Louis Ren Beres, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/ See also, by Professor Beres, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making/ (Pentagon). For authoritative early accounts by Professor Beres of nuclear war expected effects, see: Louis Ren Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis Ren Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: Americas Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis Ren Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis Ren Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israels Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israels Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy

[10] At a minimum, in this regard, the US public ought to be reminded of the explicit warning in Nietzsches Zarathustra: Do not ever seek the higher man at the market place. (Moreover, it would not be unfair to Nietzsches core meaning here to expand higher man to mean higher person.).

[11] Most egregious, in any assessment of these damages, is this presidents wilful subordination of national interest to his own presumed private interests. In this regard, one may suitably recall Sophocles cautionary speech of Creon in Antigone: I hold despicable, and always have.anyone who puts his own popularity before his country.

[12] Still the best treatments of Americas long-term disinterest in anything intellectual are Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964); and Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1959).

[13] See, by Louis Ren Beres: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/04/the-trump-presidency-a-breathtaking-assault-on-law-justice-and-security/

[14] The classic statement of Realpolitik or power politics in western philosophy is the comment of Thrasymachus in Platos Republic : Justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger. (See Plato, The Republic, 29, Benjamin Jowett, tr., World Publishing Company, 1946.) See also: Ciceros oft-quoted query: For what can be done against force without force?, Marcus Tullus Cicero, Ciceros Letters to his Friends, 78 (D.R. Shackleton Baily tr., Scholars Press, 1988).

[15] I think, therefore I am, says Ren Descartes, in his Discourse on Method (1637). Reciprocally, in his modern classic essay on Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre observes that outside the Cartesian cogito, all views are only probable.

[16] See, by Professor Louis Ren Beres: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1410&context=gjicl

[17] An apt literary reference for this condition of lost appetite is Franz Kafkas story, The Hunger Artist.

[18] In more expressly concrete terms, average American life-expectancy, unenviable for several decades, has now fallen behind most of the advanced industrial world. While Trump boasts of a wall to keep out Mexicans and assorted others, more and more Americans are trying to cross in the other direction.

[19] Apropos of this universality, international law is generally part of the law of the United States. These legal systems are always interpenetrating. Declared Mr. Justice Gray, in delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction. (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)). The specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called Supremacy Clause.

[20] Here it could be helpful to recall the words of French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man: The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself is false and against nature.

[21] Long after Plato, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of soul (in German, Seele) as the very essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provides a precise definition of the term, but clearly it was not intended by either in any ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of both mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in the present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by various express references to soul. Freud was plainly disgusted by any civilization so apparently unmoved by considerations of true consciousness (e.g., awareness of intellect and literature), and even thought that the crude American commitment to perpetually shallow optimism and to material accomplishment at any cost would occasion sweeping psychological misery.

[22] Sometimes, says Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, the worst does happen.

[23] In the end, says Goethe, we are always creatures of our own making.

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Female leftist students chant anti oppression slogans while standing in rows with piles of newspapers and cardboard ready to burn in case of tear gas attack by Revolutionary Guards, before street clashes with Hezbollah forces broke outside Tehran university campus, on the occasion of Cultural Revolution, 21st April 1981. The Cultural Revolution (1980-1987) was a period following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran where the academia of Iran was purged of Western and non-Islamic influences to bring it in line with Shia Islam. The official name used by the Islamic Republic is "Cultural Revolution." Directed by the Cultural Revolutionary Headquarters and later by the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, the revolution initially closed universities for three years (1980-1983) and after reopening banned many books and purged thousands of students and lecturers from the schools. The cultural revolution involved a certain amount of violence in taking over the university campuses since higher education in Iran at the time was dominated by leftists forces opposed to Ayatollah Khomeini's vision of theocracy, and they (unsuccessfully) resisted Khomeiniist control at many universities. (Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)

The literature that has always fascinated Australian-Iranian author Shokoofeh Azar, 48, is the kind that has the pulse of its time in its hand. The kind that grabs my heart, slaps me in the face, captures my soul, wakes me up from ignorance and reminds me that literature has the power and mystery of a dragon, says the Melbourne-based author, whose own novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (Europa Editions) does exactly this as it captures the zeitgeist of Iran following the establishment of an Islamic state.

Set in Tehran during the first decade of the 1979 Islamic Islamic Revolution, Azars novel is a fine example of the ingenious use of magic realism. Narrated by the ghost of a 13-year-old girl, Bahar, it tells the story of an intellectual family of five compelled to flee their home in Tehran for Razan, a remote village, in the hope that they will be spared the religious madness engulfing the country. They eventually succumb to the atrocities perpetrated by the fundamentalist regime.

Peopled by the living and the dead, humans and jinns, fireflies and dragonflies, spirits and soothsayers, magical creatures and mermaids, the novel opens with Roza, the mother, attaining enlightenment atop the tallest greengage plum tree in the grove of their house on a hill overlooking the 53 houses of the village. She does that at the exact moment on August 18, 1988, when her son, Sohrab, blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back, is hanged without a trial after being in captivity for many months. The next day, he is buried with hundreds of other political prisoners in a long pit in the deserts south of Tehran, without any indication or marker lest a relative come years later and tap a pebble on a headstone and murmur there is no god but God. As the novel progresses we discover how the familys destinies are deeply entangled in the events that unfold over the decade and get a glimpse into the reign of terror unleashed by the mullahs at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme religious leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who came to power after overthrowing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Pahlavi dynasty.

Ayatollah Khomeini ( Getty Images )

A month after the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, in the summer of 1988, more than 5,000 opponents of the Islamic regime were executed in the prisons without trial or by speedy and unfair trials. From that date until today, the regime has never officially acknowledged the massacre. And, due to censorship, it has never been a part of the Iranian literature, says Azar, underlining that wrong political systems take more lives than the corona virus.

Written in Persian but never published in Iran though it is available on some websites, the novel captures the tumultuous social and political realities of Iran through a delicate blend of its classic storytelling styles myths, legends and folk traditions. It was translated into English and published in Australia in 2017 by a small publisher, Wild Dingo Press. After it was shortlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize, the US, UK and Italy rights were sold to Europa Editions and the book was published overseas in January this year.

This is the first time that an Iranian author has been nominated for the International Booker Prize. However, it is unlikely that the novel will ever be published in Iran. The American translator of the novel, who often travels to the country, has chosen to remain anonymous. Azar, who worked as a journalist in Iran and covered social affairs, was put behind bars several times until she was compelled to flee the country and move to Melbourne in 2011. For Azar who is also the first Iranian woman to have hitchhiked the entire length of the Silk Road, the Booker International nomination was a dream come true. And though the award eventually went to Marieke Lucas Rijnevelds The Discomfort of Evening, the novels availability and recognition in the West means English readers will discover afresh the depth and significance of Irans rich history of classic literature and culture.

Azars focus is on highlighting the fate of humans under dictatorial regimes. For the novel, she drew on the stories of many of her friends who lost several family members and it is full of incidents and scenes that describe the atrocities of the regime in gruesome detail. In a paragraph following Sohrabs hanging, Azar writes: In the following days, the number of people executed increased so much that corpses piled high in the prison back yard and began to stink, and Evins ants, flies, crows, and cats, who hadnt had such a feast since the prison was built, licked, sucked and picked at them greedily. Juvenile political prisoners were granted a pardon by the Imam if they fired the final shot that would put the condemned out of their misery. With bruised faces, trembling hands, and pants soaked with urine, hundreds of thirteen and fourteen-year-olds, whose only crime had been participating in a party meeting, reading banned pamphlets, or distributing flyers in the street, fired the last shot into faces that were sometimes still watching them with twitching pupils.

For the mothers, just like Sohrab was to Roza, their sons were the culmination of heartbeats, desires, loves and hopes that they had endured their entire life only to lose them in the end. When Sohrab is hanged, the family sees a sense of hopelessness seeping into the very cells of their being. Their father, Hushang, asks them to write anything to come to terms with the tragedy. But with each word they commit to paper, they understand that, contrary to what their father believed, culture, knowledge, and art retreat in the face of violence, the sword and fire and for years after remain barren and mute. Bahar tells us: It had happened many times before, during the years following the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, for example, a period the scholar Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub called the two centuries of silence.

Azar says that a small minority in Iran, including her own family, believes that the Shahs regime was much more reformist, modern, and patriotic than the Islamic regime. History has practically proved the same to the Iranian people, she says, adding how, for the past 20 years, since the first large-scale demonstration, known as University Dormitory Demonstrations (Kouy-e Daneshgah) in 2000, people across the country have held thousands of peaceful demonstrations against injustice, discrimination, politicised Islam, economic corruption, political corruption, repression of dissidents and censorship. But not even in one case has the regime responded positively to these protests and the peoples share of these protests has been only arrest, imprisonment and execution, she says.

In the novel, Azar intended to be a narrator of a tiny percentage of Iranian dissidents in the 1979 revolution who voted No to the Islamic Republic in the 1980 referendum; the families that were very similar to her own. These families opposed Islam, Khomeini, and the Revolution, and considered the Islamic Revolution as an irreparable deviation in the development of modern Iran, she says. Even the dissidents, who were later arrested and executed in the summer of 1988, had voted Yes to this regime in the 1980 referendum. She says: If this novel had been written in the 1980s, a large population of Iranians would have opposed the story. But, today, 40 years after the regime formation, nearly 90 percent of Iranians have understood that the Islamic Revolution was an irreversible mistake in the process of development and democracy of Iran.

Author Shokoofeh Azar

In the novel, the fictional Khomeini is tortured by the ghosts of those executed, imprisoned in the palace of mirrors they force him to build. Trapped in the palace, the dictator meets his ugly end, having been forced to understand that while delivering monologues he may have been a fierce ruler, but in dialogue he was nothing but a bearded, illogical little boy, stubborn and pompous. The dictator whispers a single sentence in his last moments: It took 87 years to understand that the intellectual and formal rules of the monologue are fundamentally different from those of dialogue.

Azar, whose novel has brought the story of the political excesses of the Islamic regime in Iran to the attention of readers in the West, feels that there is a linguistic disconnect between the intellectual and literary products of Iranians and the world. Excellent books, mainly non-fiction, have been published in Farsi (inside and outside Iran), but have never been translated into another language. Thus, the West has little idea of the evolution of Iranian thought, she says.

Magical realism gives Azar the possibilities that realism does not. In my opinion, the best style to show the height and depth of real human feelings and emotions is magical realism. In this novel, I have tried to present that fantasy and magic in magic realism can be used in the service of factual events. Therefore, the magic realism in this novel has been used to document the real political, social and religious issues in Iran. That is, magic serves realism in this novel, she says.

It was magic realism that helped her write the kind of novel that Azar herself likes to read: one that belongs to the category of literature that reminds us of human conscience and morality amid the collapse of social morality; literature that believes in humanity; literature that comes from reckless, exploratory, critical, creative and pioneer minds. It is the kind of writing that has shaped Azars own mind and writing, as it has the minds and work of many other Iranian theatre writer-directors, mythologists, philosophers, music composers and painters.

Nawaid Anjum is an independent journalist, translator and poet. He lives in New Delhi.

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Interview: I like to be reminded that literature has the power and mystery of a dragon, says Australian-Iranian... - Hindustan Times

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Akwa Ibom State Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Comrade Ini Ememobong is set to partner traditional chieftains on enlightenment and enforcement of COVID-19 protocol.

The commissioner made this known on Friday during an advocacy visit to the State Traditional Rulers Council along Wellington Bassey Way, Uyo.

Comrade Ini Ememobong who was accompanied by his counterpart in the Ministry of Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Hon. Frank Archibong said, as Royal Fathers whose subjects look up to for direction, their actions will impact greatly on the people and pledged to partner them on COVID-19 enlightenment and enforcement.

He urged the traditional chieftains to continue to lead by example in complying strictly with COVID-19 protocols so that the people in their different domain can key in.

Disclosing that, so far COVID-19 has no cure, the state Spokesman urged the traditional rulers to join hands with Governor Udom Emmanuel Emmanuel in the fight against the spread of the dreaded pandemic with increased awareness on the NCDC/WHO/AKSG COVID-19 protocols.

The traditional rulers expressed appreciation to the Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Comrade Ini Ememobong for paying homage to the traditional institution and commended him for his readiness to partner the traditional institution in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic in the state.

The Royal fathers used the occasion to thank Governor Udom Emmanuel for the appointment of Comrade Ini Ememobong and Hon. Frank Archibong as members of the State Executive Council.

The Traditional Rulers council comprising of all the 31 Paramount Rulers in the state, is headed by a Chairman of the Council who is the Paramount Ruler of Nsit Ubium and Okuibom Ibibio, Ntenyin Solomon Etuk.

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Akwa Ibom to partner royal fathers on COVID-19 protocol enlightenment and enforcemen - Daily Sun