Read aloud.

April 17, 2020

Starlight. Ancient, starlight.

Hope is the main impulse of life. —Ilia Delio

Mystical hope. -Cynthia Bourgeault

?

Redefine.

Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the UN from 2013 to 2017, writes for TIME that “the shared enemy of a future pandemic must bring about a redefinition of national security”:

The 9/11 attacks gave those wanting to justify American engagement abroad a sense of purpose: preventing future terrorist attacks. But for the U.S., the “post-9/11 world” became defined by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost more than 7,000 service members their lives and drained vast resources.

Those wars also diverted high-level governmental attention that should have been focused on China’s rising power and Russia’s military and digital aggression. … [T]he national-security establishment concentrated on terrorism, dedicating paltry resources to battling climate change or preventing pandemics, the deadliest threats of all. …

[W]e need to unite behind ending our decades-long over-reliance on the military, and building national and international mechanisms to protect people not merely from the last threat, but from the coming ones.

 

“You can do good if you care.” -Michael Specter