a story

There was this girl. She was out on her own when she graduated high school, but was motivated enough to want to go to college. She moved from Texas to Kansas to realize her dreams, but two years later found herself broke and alone. The priest from her college Catholic Center called her up -- he had been relocated to the middle of Illinois, and wanted her to come too. It would be much cheaper. She said she would come if he found her a job.

He called back later with an apartment for her and a job to pay the rent. She came alone, and found friends and love and community.

True story.

There are still good priests and neat human beings in the world.

innovators

These days, whenever I think about how frustrating the states of the world and humanity are, I start to sift my way mentally through history, and try to discover a time when things were better. I cannot find such a time. After the invention of agriculture, there were always class disparities, always the filthy rich and the dirt poor. The kicker is that it has only been recently that there has developed some kind of inbetween! Walmart, and Enron, and KBR are nauseous, yes, but so were Napolean, Caesar, and Katherine the Great.
No, the thing that disturbes me the most is that we seem to have run out of great innovations. We cannot come up with any new ideas -- even our "new" art is just a collage of old conceptions. Humans have compiled so much information and knowledge that it is literally impossible for everyone to be an expert in everything. Sometimes I find that absolutely apalling! And we seem to be stuck! We cling to the ideas that may be broken, but still hobble along well enough that we can pretend we are getting by, and our radicals are too fantastical to even make sense anymore! Anarchists, racists, fascists, communists, democracy?
All this is to say that there has to be something better out there. It is my dream that someday we will actually start to demand it for all and not argue over what makes us all different.