Thank the stars, it’s Friday. Taylor and I are headed to Davidson this weekend, celebrating our one-year anniversary of academic furlough by watching this year’s grads walk across the stage. But you know we love you, and wouldn’t leave you without a little sumin’ sumin’ to think about over the weekend.
These are random questions, but will hopefully generate some interesting responses.
Our world is plagued with problems: war, AIDS, natural disasters, injustice, poverty, hunger, etc. If you had a magic “fix it” button you could press, but you could choose one - and only one - problem to solve, what would it be?- What is one job you’d do literally until the day you died, but for which you would receive no pay? Assume you would be provided with food and housing similar to a college meal plan and dorm, be given unlimited quantities of the wardrobe you currently own, and have unlimited free health care.
- If the next President called you and gave you the task of completely rewriting the Pledge of Allegiance, what would you submit? The current pledge is about thirty words, but I’ll give you fifty.
Proceed.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Dom Dada.
Things are quiet this weekend. I’ll try to kick things off a bit.
1. I’m not sure how we’re defining problems (the one I’ll pick is massive and intertwined with many others), but if I could pick one I think I’d go with the (ambiguous) “economic inequality” issue. Seems that everything else would be manageable if disparities weren’t as wide and deep. [note: before you call me a communist, keep in mind that the premise for this question assumes a lot of unfortunately impossible things...and doesn't require answers, just selection].
2. I frankly have no idea…and does it have to be something we’re actually capable of? Does manager of the Red Sox count? If not, I think I’m happy to say (at least in this early stage of my career) that I don’t think my career aspirations are any different than my realistic answers to this question. We’ll see how that pans out, but I love my current job and would hope that whatever work I find down the road will be fulfilling enough that I would want to do it under the conditions you describe.
3. I’ll have to ponder this one for a while.
3. I think we should get rid of the pledge of allegiance altogether. Will Wilkinson put it well: “Freedom and independence are general features of a place or people and are valuable wherever they occur. I may love America for it’s freedom, but then I should love Canada for its freedom, too. And I do! To love a place because of its general features implies that love may wane or disappear as the manifestation of those valued qualities change. But Patriotism, the love of country, is particularistic. It is a ‘monogamous’ sentiment. If you claim to be an American, Canadian, Danish, and Japanese patriot all at the same time, because you love qualities all these societies excellently exemplify, people will look at you funny. Patriotism requires that you ‘pick one,’ which implies that it is not about the general features of a place, but about special attachment. (Dual citizens may get away with picking two, but that’s just because there are two attachments, and even this is suspect.)
If you meet a women with all the attributes you claim to love about your wife, only better, and you run off with her because of their excellence, then you never really loved your wife. You loved her attributes. You can rightly claim never to have been unfaithful. Indeed, to stay would have made you untrue — to your values. But to fully love a woman, or a country, is to love some one particular thing. Now, it is surely better to love a woman than to love her qualities. But when it comes to countries, it is better by far to give your heart to freedom, and to love countries themselves incidentally and faithlessly.”
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/03/19/patriotism-and-monogamy/