Ricky & Cathy

“We have lost our faith in the powers that brought us this far—the powers of will, imagination, effort, and community.”
― Richard Dreyfuss, One Thought Scares Me...: We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them to Know; We Don't Teach Our Children What We Don't Wish Them to Know

“The process today gives everyone a chance to participate,” Tom Hayden, by way of explaining “the difference” between 1968 and 1988, said to Bryant Gumbel on NBC at 7:50 a.m. on the day after Jesse Jackson spoke at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta. This was, at a convention that had as its controlling principle the notably nonparticipatory idea of “unity”, demonstrably not true, but people inside the process, constituting as they do a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is. They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as “anecdotal”. They tend to speak a language common in Washington but not specifically shared by the rest of us. They talk about “programs”, and “policy”, and how to “implement” them or it, about “trade-offs” and constituencies and positioning the candidate and distancing the candidate, about the “story”, and how it will “play”. They speak of a candidate’s performance, by which they usually mean his skill at circumventing questions, not as citizens but as professional insiders, attuned to signals pitched beyond the range of normal hearing: “I hear he did all right this afternoon,” they were saying to one another in the press section of the Louisiana”
― Joan Didion, Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― M.K., The Big Book of Stoic Quotes

“Doctors call conditions like bad blood pressure or hypertension “invisible killers.” Not thinking will, without careful attention, kill you, or it will kill your brain and you will become—to use the medical term—“stupid.” We say stupid things, we are angered for stupid reasons, we talk stupid, vote stupid, eat stupid, hate stupid, and don’t have the slightest idea how to love ourselves or someone else. We aim our rifle at the wrong guy on the wrong battlefield. We vote to enrich those who are already billionaires, somehow thinking we are not punishing ourselves.”
― Richard Dreyfuss, One Thought Scares Me...: We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them to Know; We Don't Teach Our Children What We Don't Wish Them to Know