Bill Macy Quotes

In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb. Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began -- the lonely and heroic journey of the ego. Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought us great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights. Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again -- and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.

Cherishing every moment until my child leaves home is not possible. After all, there are jobs to do, bills to pay, and deadlines to meet. There are school assignments, extracurricular activities, home duties, and volunteer duties. But there are moments in between life’s obligations when we are in the presence of our loved ones that can be made sacred.

In this tiny interval of the twenty-first century, we, the human species, will either learn to become a life-enhancing element within the greater Earth community . . . or we will not. If we fail, humanity will be reduced to a small number, we will have forsaken our potential as a species (this time around, at least) and we will have perpetrated the extinction of many thousands of species, perhaps millions — beyond those that have already perished at our hands. And yet we now behold the possibility of a radical and foundational shift in human culture — from a suicidal, life-destroying element to a way of life worthy of our unique human potential and of Earth's dream for itself. What lies before us is the opportunity and imperative for a thorough cultural transformation — what eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls the Great Turning, the transition from an egocentric “Industrial Growth Society” to a soulcentric “Life-sustaining Society,” or what economist David Korten in The Great Turning calls the transition “from Empire to Earth Community.” The cultural historian Thomas Berry refers to this vital endeavor as the Great Work of our time.2 It is every person's responsibility and privilege to contribute to this metamorphosis. Transformational

the late 1990s, average tuition in the United States had more than doubled from when I went to school, while the value of the top Pell award dropped 25 percent. When President Bill Clinton touted his Hope Scholarship and related tuition tax credits as a doubling of federal funding for financial aid, it was a sleight of hand, catering solely to middle-class students who were already going to college. That same decade, Clinton oversaw the country’s catastrophic entry into NAFTA in 1994 and paved the way for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001. He predicted that offshoring would eventually prove to be a “win-win” for American workers. Our country still suffers the fallout of those disastrous decisions, which were cheered by business schools and Nobel Prize–winning economists, including several who have since recanted their pro-offshoring views.[

The other song we did was my cover of “Addicted to Love.” There used to be a sort of karaoke booth on Saint Mark’s, where anyone could go in and record themselves. I chose “Addicted to Love” because I liked Robert Palmer’s video, with its background cast of zombie models identically dressed and holding guitars. I took the tape with the canned version of the song back to the studio, and we sped up the vocal to make it sound higher in pitch. Later I brought the cassette mix to Macy’s, where they had a video version of the karaoke sound booth. You could customize a background while two cameras filmed you. For my backdrop I picked jungle fighters, and I wore my Black Flag earrings. The entire bill came to $19.99, and in a slick, commercial MTV world, it felt gratifying and empowering to pay for the whole thing with a credit card.

I want to believe that we can all agree that no human being deserves to die abandoned and alone. I want to believe that but in a world where people use drugs rather than go to a hospital where they've already been treated poorly, choose to die alone at home or next to a riverbank, I'm not so sure. America remains the only country on the planet where it's easier to get high than it is to get help. When crises pile on top of each other, humans tend to dissociate. It's hard to think about the climate crisis when you're worried about paying your electric bill. The more emotionally depleted we are, the more we revert to our lizard brains and the more inured we become to the suffering of others. 'I got traps that will hurt you and I will hunt you down.' Lizard brain warps our sense of self, it undercuts our health, and it literally turns us into victims of our own toxic individualism. 'Americans are drowning in the lack of grace, the lack of humility, the complete inability to assume well about others', my friend, the trauma expert, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, said.

Pamiętajcie, że to ciało już od kilku miesięcy rozkłada się w płytkim grobie, więc paskudnie śmierdzi i prawdopodobnie jest już mocno przegniłe. Wstrzymujecie oddech, chwytacie rękę trupa, ciągnięcie za nią… a ręka urywa się i zostaje wam w dłoniach. Jeśli nie jesteście wyjątkowo skrupulatni i nie macie żołądka z żelaza, to w tym momencie, pomiędzy kolejnymi głębokimi wdechami, zbieracie tylko co większe części ciała – głowę, tułów, nogi, większość rąk – a potem wynosicie się stamtąd najszybciej, jak potraficie.

For the first time in history, the individual is the basic unit of society,” the journalist Bill Bishop, the author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, from 2008, told me. “People don’t want community; they want a platform.”[14]

When the GI Bill was enacted to reward returning World War II veterans and to help America compete in the cold war, the notion of making public education free through the fourteenth grade was floated by the high-minded Truman Commission Report in 1947.[3] Had follow-up legislation and federal dollars been attached to the report during that optimistic postwar era, college access, including for Black people and women, might have become a game-changing aspect of the American social contract, along the lines of Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. But the legislation went nowhere, partly because southern schools would have had to embrace integration to be eligible for federal funds.[4]