Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting—they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity. Without this criterion, there can be no oppressive power because the first duty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth is the framing of who is human and who is not.”

“Journalists claim to be hearing "both sides" as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists... who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension... of other curators of the culture-network execs, producers, publishers”

“I now noted a symmetry in the bromides that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state.”

“it was the specificity of this place how much it seemed to embody the West and its contradictions, its claims of democracy, its foundations in exploitation. Of all the worlds I have ever explored, I don't think any shone so bright, so intense, so immediately as Palestine.”

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others," writes Edward Said, “That its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of will- ing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires... ”

“water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living under occupation. And in those West Bank settlements which I once took as mere outposts, you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools. On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.”

“soldiers everywhere lording their power over the Palestinians, many of whom would, in America, have been seen as "white." Again I felt the mental lens curving against the light and was reminded of something I have long known, something I've written and spoken about, but still was stunned to see here in such stark detail: that race is a species of power and nothing else.”

“In a place like this [Yad Vashem], your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination blooms, and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it does not, what hope is there for any of us? But it had been that kind of trip–an expansion of the darkness, a grappling with its size, its shape, its weight.”

“The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled, fought on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It's about killing a future.”

“I was saved by the books in my house, by the implicit message that learning does not belong exclusively in schools. Who would I be, left to the devices of those who seek to shrink education, to make it orderly and pliable? I don't know. But I know what I would not be: a writer.”

“We needed more writers, and I had a responsibility to help them as a reader, to be an active audience for the stories they wanted to tell, or as a teacher, so that they could learn to tell them better, to reach deeper into their own truth in the same way that brought me euphoria, and reach into the hearts of readers and set them on fire, as Mary had been set on fire since college: by words on a page.”

“Much of the current hoopla about "book bans" and "censorship" gets it wrong. This is not about me or any writer of the moment. It is about writers to come the boundaries of their imagination, the angle of their thinking, the depth of their questions.”

“The fear instilled by this rising culture is not for what it does today but what it augurs for tomorrow—a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced. In this context, the Mom for Liberty shrieking "Think of the children!" must be taken seriously.”

“This may seem self-interested, a stance taken more to avoid a stigma than to break an arrangement of power. Given the kind of loud virtue signaling that followed 2020, I understand the question. But virtues should be signaled, and the signalers should act to make their virtues manifest. It is the latter, not the former, that is the problem. And I doubt that anyone ever parts with power in the name of charity.”

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“The room was embarrassed. I remember one man... bringing this self-inflicted humiliation into view in a way that would never have occurred to me. "I can tell you, as a redneck who's worked all over the world and met people from all over the world," he said, "don't make the perception that [the students] have to compete against worse by actions like this that do not reflect well on our community." ”

“we have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible”

“Some of us see the lack of policy change and wonder if the movement itself was futile. But policy change is an end point, not an origin. The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas. And whereas white supremacy, like any other status quo, can default to the clichéd claims and excuses for the world as it is bad cops are rotten apples, America is guardian of the free world...”

“And through reading, through reporting, I begin to comprehend a truth. That moment of comprehension is ecstatic. Writing and rewriting is the attempt to communicate not just a truth but the ecstasy of a truth. It is not enough for me to convince the reader of my argument; I want them to feel that same private joy that I feel alone.”

“Nations can face the truth of what they have done even if the work is imperfect, messy, or haphazard—and can make the choice to write a new story for tomorrow. Repair is possible. Atonement is not out of reach. What is needed-and this is, of course, a great deal is the willingness to do the work. What is needed is the bravery to begin.”

“A ruler had a child who had gone astray on a journey of a hundred days. The child's friends said, "Return to your parent." The child said, "I cannot." Then the ruler sent a message to the child, saying, "Return as far as you can and I will come the rest of the way to you." In a similar way, God says, "Return to me and I will return to you." ”

“Nowadays, when someone confesses about their racist uncle or that time they said the n-word, I determine to offer a challenge toward transformation. For most confessions, this is as simple as asking, "So what are you going to do differently?" The question lifts the weight off my shoulders and forces the person to move forward, resisting the easy comfort of having spoken the confession.” (Austin Channing Brown)

“The work of repentance and the gift of receiving forgiveness are not the same. The work of repentance is demanded of every single one us for the harm we have caused or participated in, even if some accounts can never be closed. Having to live with that knowledge may, sometimes, just be one of the consequences of our actions.”

“Sometimes healing can come only by allowing oneself to not have to forgive, by understanding that there is no sin in not closing accounts with those who can never, ever repair the harm they have caused. Sometimes forgiveness comes after the permission to never forgive is finally granted. And sometimes forgiveness never comes. And that's OK too.”

“Film, music, the theater—all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see.”

“The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students' creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed…oppressors use their "humanitarianism" to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties…”

“A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined.”

“It is very hard to challenge a student who arrives in class feeling endangered.”

“There seems to be an opportunity here, for comradeship, an invitation to allow for a more conversational literature, to revisit accepted ideas of voice and authority, to recognize that students are humans to be challenged, not animals to be broken and tamed.”

“The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.” (Paulo Freire)

“But there are people who would prefer that that question remain unasked, that the world and its affairs be reducible to flash cards and pop quizzes. Paulo Freire wrote of the "banking" system of education, in which students are treated as receptacles for information and judged on how efficiently—how "meekly"—they "receive, memorize, and repeat" that information.”