“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.” John F. Kennedy
Today, November 11th is Veterans Day. It was originally set as a U.S. legal holiday to honor Armistice Day – the end of World War I, which officially took place on November 11, 1918.
President Woodrow Wilson honored the first commemoration of Armistice Day with the following words: “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations.”
In 1954, Congress, at the urging of the veterans service organizations, struck out the word “Armistice” and inserted the word “Veterans.” With the approval of this legislation on June 1, 1954, November 11 became a day to honor American veterans of all wars.
Veterans Day is officially celebrated once a year to thank our American veterans for their patriotism, love of country, and willingness to serve and sacrifice for the common good. But, I believe we should celebrate daily to honor our veterans.
“One thing that never gets old Is holding a finished book For the first time” Michael Connelly
There’s one thing I truly enjoy and that is attending lectures and hearing famous writers talk about their books and their craft of writing. Through the years I’ve been fortunate to see some of my favorite writers. But, there’s one man I never thought I’d get to see in person and that is, Michael Connelly.
A fan of Connelly’s work for decades, I’m proud to say I’ve read everything he’s ever published. I wait for each new book to drop so I can devour each page.
Michael Connelly began his career immediately after graduating from the University of Florida in 1980. His first job was as a crime beat writer at the Daytona Beach News Journal. Then in 1986 he began writing for the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel where he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of the 1985 Delta Flight 191 plane crash. This newspaper story earned Connelly a place as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The honor also brought Connelly a job as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times.
If you are not familiar with Connelly’s work, he also has a few successful television series. From the Harry Bosch series to the Lincoln Lawyer all just as entertaining as his novels.
As an Angeleno, I enjoy how he weaves into each novel locations in Los Angeles, Catalina Island and the Southern California areas very familiar to most people living in California.
Connelly’s new book, The Hollow was just released and at the lecture he handed out free signed copies. I have a stack of autographed books from authors I’ve admired the last fifty years. This signed copy is definitely one I will treasure for many years because it was signed by crime fiction writer, Michael Connelly.
“I can feel in myself, and see In others around me, a powerful Nostalgia for the time When history existed.” Francis Fukuyama
Bust of President Zachary Taylor covered in plastic after blood was smeared on it when a Trump mob broke into the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021
We’ve created a world where everybody can talk, but only a select few people are actually heard. Anybody can start a newsletter or get on social media, but only a few people are ever actually seen and heard.
Francis Fukuyama writes about in his new book, In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir, that while free speech is certainly important, the issue facing us today is about amplification.
More than a conventional memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man is a personal history as well as a political history. Returning to and developing the concepts that have been central to his work, recognition, thymos, trust, identity, human nature, institutions, and he illuminates the crises of the twenty-first century. In the Realm is the story of a life that illuminates the troubled fate of democracy and liberalism over the last fifty years.
In our current fragile democracy, who gets to be heard? How is the President of the United States allowed to use taxpayer dollars for his political propaganda? How is the President of the United States allowed to stymie freedom of speech?
Another important terrifying tell is, why did Elon Musk buy Twitter? Because it bought him a megaphone. Musk was already the richest man in the world, and yet he had to sit by the phone and wait for the BBC or CNN to call him. Billions of dollars couldn’t get him an audience, but his own social media could. And so, he bought social media.
As long as humans have been alive, some people have been heard more than others. At first, this meant the loudest or the most charismatic voices were heard. But then came the gatekeepers. First, publishers decided who could write a book or get in a newspaper. Then came radio, then TV, and now the internet.
Today, Meta and Google control the vast amount of what anybody hears or sees. Everybody can speak. But who gets heard is decided by a few companies changing algorithms and rules.
And so, we hear from the influencers and celebrities who know how to make a viral reel. We hear only about those topics that get shared or liked, or don’t violate a company’s terms of service.
Here and now, our conversations get narrowed, and the speakers are muted or amplified, depending on what a few gatekeepers actually want us to see and hear, while calling it free speech.
“Minds are won through love and nobility rather than force Happiness is virtue itself rather than its reward Hope and fear are intertwined, and Excellent things are both rare and difficult” Baruch Espinosa
Reading has been part of my daily life as far back as I can remember. Tracking what I read began in 2015 when I discovered Good Reads. This online database website that allows you to track what you’ve read, what you’d like to read and also review the books you’ve read.
Each year I set a goal to read a number of books. It’s a lofty goal but surprisingly because of Good Reads, I’m able to reach my goal.
I read a diverse subject matter of books because of my wide variety of interests and unbridled curiosity. I’m always nosing into something new I find exciting. Recently, because of all the terrible and horrific news on tv, I’m reading more than watching tv. I tape all my news shows and movies so I can watch them commercial free at my leisure. This has allowed me to spend more time reading and also writing my current work of fiction.
One area I have not read a lot about is Philosophy. One man in particular has caught my attention, Baruch Espinosa. He was born in 1632 and died in 1677 and was of Portuguese-Jewish origin and lived in the Dutch Republic. Espinosa’s philosophy addressed a multitude of areas such as philosophical discourse, metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.
In one of his writings he wrote about: “What if death is not the end? It might not be the end that you want, but what if death is not the end of your story?” According to Espinosa’s monism, there might be more to your postmortem existence than you might think.
Espinosa argued that the entire universe is just one substance. He wrote how what if your body and all of your thoughts are part of this substance. How everything is part of an eternal, infinite substance. But everything that we interact with, all of the objects and all of the people that we meet are simply modes. Modes are temporary configurations of the underlying reality.
What if, you are just a particular configuration at this moment in time? Eventually, you will move on to a different mode, because we are just waves in an ocean, briefly visible above the whole. And one day, our waves will fade back again into the sea.
Likewise, you are just a fleeting moment of the infinite. You are a temporary manifestation of the one substance. Eventually, your mind and your body will disintegrate and you will rejoin the great ocean. But your substance will not vanish; it will just transform.
Espinosa invites us to see the world from the perspective of eternity, and from this view, the distinctions we make between others and ourselves, between life and death, are just illusions born of our limited perspective. And so you are not just a human. You are the universe momentarily expressed as you.
Mind blowing thoughts from a man’s theory that one day, you will rejoin the infinite substance — not as a loss, but as part of a vast ocean of the eternal flow of modes.
