Status Updates From Purple Crayons: The Art of ...

“How many commercials … surround their products with halcyon scenes of belongingness – the family who visits grandma through Alexa, the wedding party in their Subaru … As I write, there’s an Amazon box in the recycling can beneath my desk with the words ‘You’re never ALONE when you have boxes to open’ printed on the side. Could there ever be a statement both so enticing and so wrong?”

“Self-determination oxygenates the American spirit,” but is “ often perverted in the United States, twisted into a kind of individualism that defies the vital importance of community life and interdependence. … When people refuse to wear masks during a pandemic, putting others at risk for the sake of their right to govern their behavior, they are participating in the ugly side of self-determination.”

“In many ways we live today in the world that Johnson and others of his time were worried about. Many thinkers back then were concerned about the commodification of everything,including ourselves, all of it available for the right price.”