Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“In Genesis, when God gives Eve and Adam authority over creation, it is not permission to do whatever they want; it’s an honoring. It’s permission to be the mouth and hands of justice, protectors of every created thing. Over time we’ve taken this role to look more like domination than cultivation. Instead of resting the land, we overharvest it, we exhaust it.”

“Admittedly, when you are existing in a society that has you working multiple jobs, raising children without help, barely getting by, you cannot be faulted for not having the breathing room to recognize the danger of carbon emissions and microplastics in oceans, or even the water flowing out of your own tap.”

“When Flint, Michigan, didn’t have clean water for a decade, the land and creation was suffocating from that same injustice, but that injustice was able to survive for so long precisely because of the people it was tormenting. Their dignity was obscured by our malformed relationship to the earth.”

“I used to think justice for the land and justice for humankind were two different callings. In the sugarcane, I learned that any separation is an illusion.”

“Marches, rallies, sit-ins—holy embodiments that should be respected deeply, for they protect and guide us today. But the first time I picked up James Baldwin, I finally saw myself. It occurred to me that I could be an activist from my own source of power—words. It can only make our journey toward justice more robust, more beautiful, when we offer a diversity of paths, a more expansive vision of action.”

“Can there be a form of contemplation that is at once stillness and movement? Some might say the beginnings of Christian monasticism were, in part, a defiant protest against the elitism and centering of the upper class in the faith. And today, activism tells the truth about what is and imagines what should be. This imagination for justice requires contemplation.”

“A mentor and friend once said to me, If there is someone who is both activist and contemplative and who does both well, I have not yet met them.”

“Activism is the body of justice. It invites you into embodied declarations of dignity and worth. As you participate in its body, you find yourself increasingly grounded in your own. I think activism is a virtue. To be a person who cares and honors creation is to be a person who acts in favor of its flourishing. I am distrustful of spiritual people who are not roused in their bodies on behalf of justice.”

“But as Bayard Rustin said, 'When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him." ”

“For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?”

“Do not these groups emerge, live, and disappear under pressure from concrete and authentic needs, unburdened by the ballast of hollow traditions? Is not their attempt to create an articulate form of living within the truth and to renew the feeling of higher responsibility in an apathetic society really a sign of some kind of rudimentary moral reconstitution?”

“Do not these small communities, bound together by thousands of shared tribulations, give rise to some of those special humanly meaningful political relationships and ties that we have been talking about? Are not these communities... motivated mainly by a common belief in the profound significance of what they are doing... by a living sense of solidarity and fraternity?”

“Any accumulation of power whatsoever (one of the characteristics of automatism) should be profoundly alien to it. They would be structures not in the sense of organizations or institutions, but like a community. Their authority certainly cannot be based on long-empty traditions, like the tradition of mass political parties, but rather on how, in concrete terms, they enter into a given situation.”

“There can and must be structures that are open, dynamic, and small; beyond a certain point, human ties like personal trust and personal responsibility cannot work.”

“the issue is the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love. I believe in structures that are not aimed at the technical aspect of the execution of power, but at the significance of that execution in structures held together more by a commonly shared feeling of the importance of certain communities than by commonly shared expansionist ambitions directed outward.”

“any existential revolution should provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to... the "human order," which no political order can replace. A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility, a newfound inner relationship to other people and to the human community...”

“In 1968, I felt that our problem could be solved by forming an opposition party that would compete publicly for power with the Communist Party. I have long since come to realize, however, that it is just not that simple and that no opposition party in and of itself, just as no new electoral laws in and of themselves, could make society proof against some new form of violence.”

“But to cling to the notion of traditional parliamentary democracy as ones political ideal and to succumb to the illusion that only this tried and true form is capable of guaranteeing human beings enduring dignity and an independent role in society would, in my opinion, be at the very least shortsighted.”

“In a democracy human beings may enjoy many personal freedoms and securities that are unknown to us, but in the end they do them no good, for they are ultimately victims of the same automatism, and are incapable of defending their concerns about their own identity or preventing their superficialization or transcending concerns about their own personal survival to become proud and responsible members of the polis...”

“In his June 1978 Harvard lecture, Solzhenitsyn describes the illusory nature of freedoms not based on personal responsibility and the chronic inability of the traditional democracies, as a result, to oppose violence and totalitarianism.”

“political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from...personal responsibility; those complex focuses of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that...information...can with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity's rediscovery of itself”

“It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies.”

“This planetary challenge to the position of human beings in the world is, of course, also taking place in the Western world, the only difference being the social and political forms it takes. Heidegger refers expressly to a crisis of democracy. There is no real evidence that Western democracy, that is, democracy of the traditional parliamentary type, can offer solutions that are any more profound.”

“a solution cannot be sought in some... external proposal for change, or in a revolution that is merely philosophical, merely social, merely technological, or even merely political. ... their most intrinsic locus can only be human existence in the profoundest sense of the word. It is only from that basis that it can become a generally ethical—and, of course, ultimately a political—reconstitution of society.”

“The only social, or rather political, attempt to do something about it that contains the necessary element of universality (responsibility to and for the whole) is the desperate and, given the turmoil the world is in, fading voice of the ecological movement, and even there the attempt is limited to a particular notion of how to use technology to oppose the dictatorship of technology.”

“In these cases, it is not justice that is being granted but aid—often born of the guilt of the captor. Make no mistake, if you are not free, it is not justice. I do not celebrate crumbs when I know of the bread that has been promised to me.”

“For me, there is no liberation without justice. They are not the same, but they depend on one another. An enslaved person, while they are enslaved, will never know justice. Just because the master lets you live in the house doesn’t make you any freer.”

“And that power which is stolen, malformed, or inequitable will, no matter how well intentioned, always cast its weight in the wrong places. This is rarely accidental. Injustice has survived by cowering behind the guises of morality and ethics.”

“You cannot tell the story of injustice without telling the story of power. It requires integrity to become honest about how our power systems and our position in the world affect our capacity to do justice. Which is to say, justice can never be severed from mercy.”

“From bell hooks: "Justice is different from violence and retribution; it requires complex accounting." When Tupac said only God could judge him, this was not mere bombast; it was naming the truth that no one else can be trusted to judge, to do this "accounting," certainly not the ones whose greed and systemic oppression is the impetus for our desperate rule breaking.”