Protest Motivation Quotes

The hallway led me to the stairway of a million steps. My leg screamed in protest. I sighed and started climbing. I just had to keep from limping. Limping showed weakness, and I didn’t need any enterprising, career-motivated shapeshifters trying to challenge me for dominance right about now. I had once mentioned my desire for an elevator, and His Majesty asked me if I would like a flock of doves to carry me up to my quarters so my feet wouldn’t have to touch the ground. We were sparring at the time and I kicked him in the kidney in retaliation.

What my mom failed to understand was that I didn't even want long hair -- I needed long hair. And my desire for protracted, flowing locks had virtually nothing to do with fashion, nor was it a form of protest against the constructions of mainstream society. My motivation was far more philosophical. I wanted to rock.

More than my questions about the efficacy of social actions were my questions about my own motives. Do i want social justice for the oppressed or do i jusy want to be known as a socially active person? I spend 95 percent of my time thinking about myself anyway. I dont have to watch the evening news to see the world is bad, i only have to look at myself. I am not brow beating here, i am only saying that true charge , true living giving, God honoring change would have to start with the individual. I was the very problem i had been protesting. I wanted to make a sign that read “I am the problem

Sprinting while naked is not an easy thing. I’ve seen streakers before, and while I’ve admired their desire for mischief, I’ve never thought of it as a painful undertaking. I was running for my life down the hall, and despite the motivation to maintain top speed, Captain Winky and his two first mates were voicing a loud, painful protest of their mistreatment

I'm all for fighting tyranny and oppression.

Even the tiny protests help

If you give up every time you don't achieve the immediate gain you want, you're just guaranteeing that the worst is going to happen... You can't expect an easy victory after one protest march.

I must protest.” “To whom?” That seemed to flummox him. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “But a protest must be lodged nonetheless.” “I don’t think the dog meant to shoot him,” Iris demurred. “You mean the author does not make the canine’s motivations clear?” Iris assumed a scrupulously even expression. “Even she lacks such talent.

This realization is much like Donald Miller's awakening after a day of protesting President Bush: "More than my questions about the efficacy of social action were my questions about my own motives. Do I want social justice for the oppressed, or do I just want to be known as a socially active person? I spend 95 percent of my time thinking about myself anyway. I don't have to watch the evening news to see that the world is bad, I only have to look at myself.... I was the very problem that I had been protesting. I wanted to make a sign that read "I AM THE PROBLEM!" " I cannot plead innocent. I have contributed to the sum total of misery in the world. ...Or, as Casey incisively remarks, "I have more evidence of crime against myself than I have for any other human being. My conscience accuses me directly of so much malice, whereas I know only by hearsay of the evil done by others. To be humble before God is to know that I am blameworthy." " Such Christian humility is not the same thing as low self-esteem or poor self-image. It is simply the refusal to be deluded by the lie that I am guiltless: "Empowered by the intensity of God's unconditional love for me, I find it possible to demolish my defenses and admit to the truth of my condition. There is nothing in my constitution or personal history that would give me any confidence in my own competence to bring my life to a happy conclusion.

Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations. White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancement, there’s a reaction, a backlash. The

In the prologue, I explained the gradual and subtle process in which history is re-written to fit a country's present self-image. As a result, many rich-country people recommend free-trade, free-market policies in the honest belief that these are policies that thier own ancestors used in order to make their countries rich. When the poor countries protest that those policies hurt, those protests are dismissed as being intellectually misguided or as serving the interests of their corrupt leaders. It never occurs to those Bad Samaritans that the policies they recommend are fundamentally at odds with what history teaches us to be the best development policies. The intention behind their policy recommendations may be honourable, but their effects are no less harmful than those from policy recommendations motivated by deliberate ladder-kicking.

The myth of altruism as a motivating factor in our behavior could arise and survive only in a society bundled in the sterile gauze of New England puritanism and Protestant morality and tied together with the ribbons of Madison Avenue public relations. It is one of the classic American fairy tales. From

What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious of God than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one. For even those who might have been there for no better motive than that they were obliged to be, were at least free from any of the self-conscious and human constraint which is never absent from a Protestant church where people are definitely gathered together as people, as neighbors, and always have at least half an eye for one another, if not all of both eyes.

Addiction to softer drugs like alcohol or pot can be just as damaging but more insidious. The costs mount so slowly that they can be difficult to detect. That’s especially true of pot. If she’s using daily, don’t accept her protestations that marijuana has no deleterious effect on her. I don’t care how many cannabis evangelists she can rally to her cause, researchers tell a different story about heavy pot use. Heavy pot use lowers IQ (Meier et al. 2012); it damages memory (Solowij and Battisti 2008); it impairs decision-making (Tamm et al. 2013); it devastates motivation (Treadway et al. 2012; Smirnov and Kiyatkin 2008; Bloomfield et al. 2014); and it increases anxiety (Zvolensky et al. 2008). Finally, no matter what you might have heard, pot is addictive. In part, this is because it lowers the amount of available dopamine in the brain, necessitating its continued use to maintain normal levels (Hirvonen et al. 2011).

Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; in its precepts 'thou shalt not' predominates unduly over 'thou shalt'. It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life: in this falling far below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to give to human morality an essentially selfish character, by disconnecting each man's feelings of duty from the interests of his fellow-creatures [...]. It is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience;

Owen used to say that the most disturbing thing about the antiwar movement—against the Vietnam War—was that he suspected self-interest motivated many of the protesters; he thought that if the issue of many of the protesters being drafted was removed from the issue of the war, there would be very little protest at all.

Proactive boundaries go beyond problem identification to problem solving. Your child needs to know that in protesting, she has only identified the problem, not solved it. A tantrum doesn’t solve anything. She needs to use these feelings to motivate her to action, to address the issue at hand. She should think about her responses and choose the best one available.

With religious nonconformists outnumbering Anglicans after 1700, and economic motives eclipsing any sense of a religious mission, the colony adopted a moderate religious stance where all Protestants, and even Jews (but not Catholics), were tolerated. But as in North Carolina, religious toleration was a response to circumstances rather than a commitment to principle.

East Germany brought down their wall in 1989 as a sign of surrender. The Soviet experiment had failed, and the Eastern bloc realized they couldn't win the Cold War. The falling Berlin Wall was their white flag. The walls I'd visited, though, expressed the opposite. The rising of these walls was the surrender. The walls stood as evidence that their conflicts were unwinnable and permanent. When diplomacy and negotiation crumbles, when the motivation to find solutions wanes and dies, when governments resign themselves to failure, the walls go up. Instead of trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we build a wall. Instead of finding a way for Catholics and Protestants to live together in Belfast, we build a wall. Instead of addressing the despair that leads migrants across our borders, we build a wall. The walls admit our defeat. We throw up a wall right after we throw up our hands.

But whether people cultivate an exterior meant to signal their politics, or they cultivate, instead, a strait-laced appearance that does not signal their politics, their self-presentation is deliberate. It is meant to reinforce who they are (who they consider themselves to be). People tell themselves, strenuously, that they believe in this or that political position, whether it is to do with wealth distribution or climate policy or the rights of animals. They commit to some plan, whether it is to stop old-growth logging, or protest nuclear power, or block a shipping port in order to bring capitalism, or at least logistics, to its knees. But the deeper motivation for their rhetoric—the values they promote, the lifestyle they have chosen, the look they present—is to shore up their own identity. It is natural to attempt to reinforce identity, given how fragile people are underneath these identities they present to the world as “themselves.” Their stridencies are fragile, while their need to protect their ego, and what forms that ego, is strong.

...The underlying motive for the French wars [of 1562-1598] was not religious, but dynastic. By the mid-16th century, the Valois family of kings, who had ruled France since 1328, was losing its grasp on political power. Valois King Henry II died in 1559, leaving four sons, all too young or too feeble to rule alone, and three rival noble families, all eager to seize power. One, the Guise (who had married into the royal family), were Catholic; their enemies, the Bourbon and the (more moderate) Montmerency, were Protestant. The Bourbon, in particular, were supported by the many small local Protestant churches that had been set up in France by supporters of Calvin's teachings. Unlike Protestants in England or Germany, they were not controlled by powerful rulers or city councils; some were prepared to use violence and other forms of lawlessness to further Protestant reform. Concerned by this threat to public order, and continuing the Valois' kings generally hostile policy toward reform, in 1562 the Guise ordered the massacre of 74 Protestants at a church service.

Esau sold his birth right, because he wanted a plate of meal. Today, When I look in the news, social media and on the street. I see people doing the same. They are selling their loyalty, trust, love, human rights, freedom, bodies, lives for a plate of meal. They will do or say anything for money , food or alcohol. Free people are selling themselves as slaves, for a plate of meal. They are getting paid to do dirty, bad , evil things. People are paid, to destroy their own future. Never sell yourself shot, if you want peace or a future. Genesis 25:30-34

The great majority of those who, like Frankl, were liberated from Nazi concentration camps chose to leave for other countries rather than return to their former homes, where far too many neighbors had turned murderous. But Viktor Frankl chose to stay in his native Vienna after being freed and became head of neurology at a main hospital in Vienna. The Austrians he lived among often perplexed Frankl by saying they did not know a thing about the horrors of the camps he had barely survived. For Frankl, though, this alibi seemed flimsy. These people, he felt, had chosen not to know. Another survivor of the Nazis, the social psychologist Ervin Staub, was saved from a certain death by Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who made Swedish passports for thousands of desperate Hungarians, keeping them safe from the Nazis. Staub studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers. For Frankl, the “not-knowing” he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbors who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well. That same plea of innocence, I had no idea, has contemporary resonance in the emergence of an intergenerational tension. Young people around the world are angry at older generations for leaving as a legacy to them a ruined planet, one where the momentum of environmental destruction will go on for decades, if not centuries. This environmental not-knowing has gone on for centuries, since the Industrial Revolution. Since then we have seen the invention of countless manufacturing platforms and processes, most all of which came to be in an era when we had no idea of their ecological impacts. Advances in science and technology are making ecological impacts more transparent, and so creating options that address the climate crisis and, hopefully, will be pursued across the globe and over generations. Such disruptive, truly “green” alternatives are one way to lessen the bleakness of Earth 2.0—the planet in future decades—a compelling fact of life for today’s young. Were Frankl with us today (he died in 1997), he would no doubt be pleased that so many of today’s younger people are choosing to know and are finding purpose and meaning in surfacing environmental facts and acting on them.

The person you received word from,” I said after a while. “You love one of them, don’t you?” Gauri started, a protest on the tip of her lips. “I…,” she began before weakly trailing off. She quickly regained composure and her eyes narrowed. “That’s none of your concern.” You are my concern, I wanted to say. You are my sister. But I said nothing. I just let her words hang in the air. “The best motivation is love,” I offered. Beside me, Kamala nodded vigorously. “And food!” Gauri’s eyes widened. Like a ghost of sound laid atop the other, I heard what Gauri did--a sort of mangled neighing. “Your horse is rather strange.” Kamala nodded again.

When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we've actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless. Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn't have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations. White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama's ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancements, there's a reaction, a backlash.

If man were infinitely malleable, there would have been nor revolutions; there would have been no change because a culture would have succeeded in making man submit to its patterns without resistance. But man, being only relatively malleable, has always reacted with protest against conditions which made the disequilibrium between the social order and his human needs too drastic or unbearable. The attempt to reduce this disequilibrium and the need to establish a more acceptable and desirable solution is at the very core of the dynamism of the evolution of man in history. Man's protest arose not only because of material suffering; specifically human needs...are an equally strong motivation for revolution and the dynamics of change.

But, curiously, Peter did not grasp—perhaps he did not wish to grasp—the political implications of this new view of man. He had not gone to the West to study “the art of government.” Although in Protestant Europe he was surrounded by evidence of the new civil and political rights of individual men embodied in constitutions, bills of rights and parliaments, he did not return to Russia determined to share power with his people. On the contrary, he returned not only determined to change his country but also convinced that if Russia was to be transformed, it was he who must provide both the direction and the motive force. He would try to lead; but where education and persuasion were not enough, he would drive—and if necessary flog—the backward nation forward.

Patriotism comes from the same Latin word as father. Blind patriotism is collective transference. In it the state becomes a parent and we citizens submit our loyalty to ensure its protection. We may have been encouraged to make that bargain from our public school education, our family home, religion, or culture in general. We associate safety with obedience to authority, for example, going along with government policies. We then make duty, as it is defined by the nation, our unquestioned course. Our motivation is usually not love of country but fear of being without a country that will defend us and our property. Connection is all-important to us; excommunication is the equivalent of death, the finality we can’t dispute. Healthy adult loyalty is a virtue that does not become blind obedience for fear of losing connection, nor total devotion so that we lose our boundaries. Our civil obedience can be so firm that it may take precedence over our concern for those we love, even our children. Here is an example: A young mother is told by the doctor that her toddler is allergic to peanuts and peanut oil. She lets the school know of her son’s allergy when he goes to kindergarten. Throughout his childhood, she is vigilant and makes sure he is safe from peanuts in any form. Eighteen years later, there is a war and he is drafted. The same mother, who was so scrupulously careful about her child’s safety, now waves goodbye to him with a tear but without protest. Mother’s own training in public school and throughout her life has made her believe that her son’s life is expendable whether or not the war in question is just. “Patriotism” is so deeply ingrained in her that she does not even imagine an alternative, even when her son’s life is at stake. It is of course also true that, biologically, parents are ready to let children go just as the state is ready to draft them. What a cunning synchronic-ity. In addition, old men who decide on war take advantage of the timing too. The warrior archetype is lively in eighteen-year-olds, who are willing to fight. Those in their mid-thirties, whose archetype is being a householder and making a mark in their chosen field, will not show an interest in battlefields of blood. The chiefs count on the fact that young braves will take the warrior myth literally rather than as a metaphor for interior battles. They will be willing to put their lives on the line to live out the collective myth of societies that have not found the path of nonviolence. Our collective nature thus seems geared to making war a workable enterprise. In some people, peacemaking is the archetype most in evidence. Nature seems to have made that population smaller, unfortunately. Our culture has trained us to endure and tolerate, not to protest and rebel. Every cell of our bodies learned that lesson. It may not be virtue; it may be fear. We may believe that showing anger is dangerous, because it opposes the authority we are obliged to appease and placate if we are to survive. This explains why we so admire someone who dares to say no and to stand up or even to die for what he believes. That person did not fall prey to the collective seduction. Watching Jeopardy on television, I notice that the audience applauds with special force when a contestant risks everything on a double-jeopardy question. The healthy part of us ardently admires daring. In our positive shadow, our admiration reflects our own disavowed or hidden potential. We, too, have it in us to dare. We can stand up for our truth, putting every comfort on the line, if only we can calm our long-scared ego and open to the part of us that wants to live free. Joseph Campbell says encouragingly, “The part of us that wants to become is fearless.” Religion and Transference Transference is not simply horizontal, from person to person, but vertical from person to a higher power, usually personified as God. When

Richard Lovelace makes a compelling case that the best defense is a good offense. “The ultimate solution to cultural decay is not so much the repression of bad culture as the production of sound and healthy culture,” he writes. “We should direct most of our energy not to the censorship of decadent culture, but to the production and support of healthy expressions of Christian and non-Christian art.”10 Public protests and boycotts have their place. But even negative critiques are effective only when motivated by a genuine love for the arts. The long-term solution is to support Christian artists, musicians, authors, and screenwriters who can create humane and healthy alternatives that speak deeply to the human condition. Exploiting “Talent” The church must also stand against forces that suppress genuine creativity, both inside and outside its walls. In today’s consumer culture, one of the greatest dangers facing the arts is commodification. Art is treated as merchandise to market for the sake of making money. Paintings are bought not to exhibit, nor to grace someone’s home, but merely to resell. They are financial investments. As Seerveld points out, “Elite art of the New York school or by approved gurus such as Andy Warhol are as much a Big Business today as the music business or the sports industry.”11 Artists and writers have been reduced to “talent” to be plugged into the manufacturing process. That approach may increase sales, but it will suppress the best and highest forms of art. In the eighteenth century, the world nearly lost the best of Mozart’s music because the adults in the young man’s life treated him primarily as “talent” to exploit.

In the austere pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes he carefully explained to his readers that d'Annunzio's lewdness must not be confused with the obscenities of Zola, whereat Ouida protested that they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe the life and emotions of a woman whose whole life is given up to love, and then, as we know, he chose a singularly crude and professional person, using her career as a symbol of the Second Empire. D'Annunzio has never described women with any other reason for existence but love, yet none of his heroines has poor Nana's uninspiring motives.

In any event, should you doubt that your knowledge of Western history is distorted by the work of these distinguished bigots, consider whether you believe any of the following statements: The Catholic Church motivated and actively participated in nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic violence, justifying it on grounds that the Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion, until the Vatican II Council was shamed into retracting that doctrine in 1965. But, the Church still has not made amends for the fact that Pope Pius XII is rightfully known as “Hitler’s Pope.” Only recently have we become aware of remarkably enlightened Christian gospels, long ago suppressed by narrow-minded Catholic prelates. Once in power as the official church of Rome, Christians quickly and brutally persecuted paganism out of existence. The fall of Rome and the ascendancy of the Church precipitated Europe’s decline into a millennium of ignorance and backwardness. These Dark Ages lasted until the Renaissance/Enlightenment, when secular scholars burst through the centuries of Catholic barriers against reason. Initiated by the pope, the Crusades were but the first bloody chapter in the history of unprovoked and brutal European colonialism. The Spanish Inquisition tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people for “imaginary” crimes, such as witchcraft and blasphemy. The Catholic Church feared and persecuted scientists, as the case of Galileo makes clear. Therefore, the Scientific “Revolution” occurred mainly in Protestant societies because only there could the Catholic Church not suppress independent thought. ► Being entirely comfortable with slavery, the Catholic Church did nothing to oppose its introduction in the New World nor to make it more humane. Until very recently, the Catholic view of the ideal state was summed up in the phrase, “The divine right of kings.” Consequently, the Church has bitterly resisted all efforts to establish more liberal governments, eagerly supporting dictators. It was the Protestant Reformation that broke the repressive Catholic grip on progress and ushered in capitalism, religious freedom, and the modern world. Each of these statements is part of the common culture, widely accepted and frequently repeated. But, each is false and many are the exact opposite of the truth! A chapter will be devoted to summarizing recent repetitions of each of these statements and to demonstrating that each is most certainly false.

This, of course, gives rise to the argument of the invalidation of the Old Testament with the coming of the New, the idea being that the actions of Jesus were so antithesis to the “laws” prescribed in Exodus and Leviticus that the modern Christian should base the standards of his doctrine on the teaching of the son of their god instead. There are several large flaws with this reasoning, my favorite being the most obvious: no one does it, and if they did, what would be the point of keeping the Old Testament? How many Christian sermons have been arched around Old Testament verses, or signs waved at protests and marches bearing Leviticus 18:22, etc? Where stands the basis for the need to splash the Decalogue of Exodus in public parks and in school rooms, or the continuous reference of original sin and the holiness of the sabbath (which actually has two distinctly different definitions in the Old Testament)? A group of people as large as the Christian nation cannot possibly hope to avoid the negative reaction of Old Testament nightmares (e.g. genocide, rape, and infanticide, amongst others) by claiming it shares no part of their modern doctrine when, in actuality, it overflows with it. Secondly, one must always remember that the New Testament is in constant coherence with proving the prophecy of the Old Testament, continuously referring to: “in accordance with the prophet”, etc., etc., ad nauseum—the most important of which coming from the words of Jesus himself: “Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” (Matthew 5:17) And even this is hypocritical, considering how many times Jesus himself stood in the way of Mosaic law, most notably against the stoning of the woman taken by the Pharisees for adultery, the punishment of which should have resulted in her death by prophetic mandate of the Old Testament despite the guilt that Jesus inflicted upon her attackers (a story of which decent evidence has been discovered by Bart Ehrman and others suggesting that it wasn’t originally in the Gospel of John in the first place [7]). All of this, of course, is without taking into account the overwhelming pile of discrepancies that is the New Testament in whole, including the motivation for the holy family to have been in Bethlehem versus Nazareth in the first place (the census that put them there or the dream that came to Joseph urging him to flee); the first three Gospels claim that the Eucharist was invented during Passover, but the Fourth says it was well before, and his divinity is only seriously discussed in the Fourth; the fact that Herod died four years before the Current Era; the genealogy of Jesus in the line of David differs in two Gospels as does the minutiae of the Resurrection, Crucifixion, and the Anointment—on top of the fact that the Gospels were written decades after the historical Jesus died, if he lived at all.

The American republic now extended across a third of a continent, and was unlikely to stop there. How then could the British time bomb of generosity—the ocean of land ceded in 1783—fail to revive familiar protests of “no taxation without representation”? Where, if that happened, would Hamilton’s “UNION” be? Madison solved these issues of time and space by shifting scale. In doing so he drew, knowingly or not, 65 on Machiavelli. For only in republics, the Florentine had observed, could the “common good” be “looked to properly.” By expanding the number who benefited, the influence of the few who didn’t could be reduced: not all parts, submerged in wholes, need drown. 66 Scale could be the life preserver. There were, Madison acknowledged, dangers in this: By enlarging too much the number of electors [voters], you render the representative too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects. But surely there existed “a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie.” In this way balancing factions—a Burkean enterprise—could put “inconveniences” to good use: Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. The proposed Constitution “forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.” 67

A sudden yowl from up ahead had them all starting. A small tree smoked on one side, the faint glow of fire darting from a burning patch of dead foliage. The yowl came again. Matt hurried over and peered up the tree to see a calico cat, its green eyes staring down, as if in accusation. "No," Reyna said, stopping beside him. "We are not rescuing the cat." "But the tree -" "- is on fire. I see that. Have you ever owned a cat? If they can go up, they can come down. Guaranteed." Matt eyed the feline. It eyed him back, then yowled, as if to say Well, hurry it up. "It might be too scared to come down," he said. "It's a cat," Reyna said. "They don't get scared - just annoyed, which I'm going to get if you insist on playing hero and rescuing that faker." She scowled at the cat. "Yes, I mean you. Faker." The cat sniffed, then turned to Matt, clearly sensing the softer touch. Owen stepped forward. "If you'll feel better rescuing the cat, Matt, then go ahead. We aren't on a tight schedule." Reyna waved her arms around the smoking street. "Um, Ragnarök?" "And the longer you two bicker ..." "Fine," Reyna said. "I've got this." Before Matt could protest, she walked to the base of the tree, grabbed the lowest branch, and swung up. "Rodeo girl, remember? Also, five years of gymnastics, which my mother thought would make me more graceful and feminine. Her mistake." She shimmied along a branch. "Come on, faker. I'm your designated hero for today." She looked down at Matt. "And if you ever tell anyone I rescued a cat from a tree ..." Before Matt could answer, the cat sprang to the ground. "Arggh!" Reyna said. "You scared him out," Matt said. "He just needed the extra motivation. No, wait. It's a she. Calicos are almost always female." "Are they? Huh." Reyna swung out. The cat sat on the ground below, watching. "See?" Matt said. "She's grateful." "She's gloating. Let's go.

We have therefore to inquire what there is about Machiavelli to impress the mind of Europe so prodigiously and so curiously, and why the European mind felt it necessary to deform his doctrine so absurdly. There are certainly contributing causes. The reputation of Italy as the home of fantastic, wanton and diabolical crime filled the French, and still more the English, imagination as they are now filled by the glories of Chicago or Los Angeles, and predisposed imagination toward the creation of a mythical representative for this criminality. But still more the growth of Protestantism — and France, as well as England, was then largely a Protestant country — created a disposition against a man who accepted in his own fashion the orthodox view of original sin. Calvin, whose view of humanity was far more extreme, and certainly more false, than that of Machiavelli, was never treated to such opprobrium; but when the inevitable reaction against Calvinism came out of Calvinism, and from Geneva, in the doctrine of Rousseau, that too was hostile to Machiavelli. For Machiavelli is a doctor of the mean, and the mean is always insupportable to partisans of the extreme. A fanatic can be tolerated. The failure of a fanaticism such as Savonarola's ensures its toleration by posterity, and even approving patronage. But Machiavelli was no fanatic; he merely told the truth about humanity. The world of human motives which he depicts is true — that is to say, it is humanity without the addition of superhuman Grace. It is therefore tolerable only to persons who have also a definite religious belief; to the effort of the last three centuries to supply religious belief by belief in Humanity the creed of Machiavelli is insupportable. Lord Morley voices the usual modern hostile admiration of Machiavelli when he intimates that Machiavelli saw very clearly what he did see, but that he saw only half of the truth about human nature. What Machiavelli did not see about human nature is the myth of human goodness which for liberal thought replaces the belief in Divine Grace.

Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after his lung cancer was diagnosed, he continued the activities that he considered important, marching against crackhouses, campaigning against the demolition of the Ford Auditorium, organizing Detroit Summer, making speeches, and writing letters to the editor and articles for the SOSAD newsletter and Northwest Detroiter. In 1992 while he was undergoing the chemotherapy that cleared up his bladder cancer, he helped form the Coalition against Privatization and to Save Our City. The coalition was initiated by activist members of a few AFSCME locals who contacted Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings who in turn contacted us. Jimmy helped write the mission statement that gave the union activists a sense of themselves as not only city workers but citizens of the city and its communities. The coalition’s town meetings and demonstrations were instrumental in persuading the new mayor, Dennis Archer, to come out against privatization, using language from the coalition newsletter to explain his position. At the same time Jimmy was putting out the garbage, keeping our corner at Field and Goethe free of litter and rubbish, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, picking cranberries, and keeping up “his” path on Sutton. After he entered the hospice program, which usually means death within six months, and up to a few weeks before his death, Jimmy slowed down a bit, but he was still writing and speaking and organizing. He used to say that he wasn’t going to die until he got ready, and because he was so cheerful and so engaged it was easy to believe him. A few weeks after he went on oxygen we did three movement-building workshops at the SOSAD office for a group of Roger Barfield’s friends who were trying to form a community-action group following a protest demonstration at a neighborhood sandwich shop over the murder of one of their friends. With oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable oxygen tank by his side, Jimmy spoke for almost an hour on one of his favorite subjects, the need to “think dialectically, rather than biologically.” Recognizing that this was probably one of Jimmy’s last extended speeches, I had the session videotaped by Ron Scott. At the end of this workshop we asked participants to come to the next session prepared to grapple with three questions: What can we do to make our neighborhoods safe? How can we motivate people to transform? How can we create jobs?

TRY: Noticing the resistance to the impulse to give, the worries about the future, the feeling that you may be giving too much, or the thought that it won’t be appreciated “enough,” or that you will be exhausted from the effort, or that you won’t get anything out of it, or that you don’t have enough yourself. Consider the possibility that none of these are actually true, but that they are just forms of inertia, constriction, and fear-based self-protection. These thoughts and feelings are the rough edges of self-cherishing, which rub up against the world and frequently cause us and others pain and a sense of distance, isolation, and diminishment. Giving sands down such rough edges and helps us become more mindful of our inner wealth. By practicing mindfulness of generosity, by giving, and by observing its effects on ourselves and others, we are transforming ourselves, purifying ourselves, discovering expanded versions of ourselves. You may protest that you don’t have enough energy or enthusiasm to give anything away, that you are already feeling overwhelmed, or impoverished. Or you may feel that all you do is give, give, give, and that it is just taken for granted by others, not appreciated or even seen, or that you use it as a way of hiding from pain and fear, as a way of making sure others like you or feel dependent on you. Such difficult patterns and relationships themselves call out for attention and careful scrutiny. Mindless giving is never healthy or generous. It is important to understand your motives for giving, and to know when some kinds of giving are not a display of generosity but rather of fear and lack of confidence. In the mindful cultivation of generosity, it is not necessary to give everything away, or even anything. Above all, generosity is an inward giving, a feeling state, a willingness to share your own being with the world. Most important is to trust and honor your instincts but, at the same time, to walk the edge and take some risks as part of your experiment. Perhaps you need to give less, or to trust your intuition about exploitation or unhealthy motives or impulses. Perhaps you do need to give, but in a different way, or to different people. Perhaps most of all, you need to give to yourself first for a while. Then you might try giving others a tiny bit more than you think you can, consciously noting and letting go of any ideas of getting anything in return. Initiate giving. Don’t wait for someone to ask. See what happens—especially to you. You may find that you gain a greater clarity about yourself and about your relationships, as well as more energy rather than less. You may find that, rather than exhausting yourself or your resources, you will replenish them. Such is the power of mindful, selfless generosity. At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient…only the universe rearranging itself.

We can also surface milestones that would have gone unnoticed. • What if every member of a youth sports team got a “before-and-after” video of their progress? • Number-heavy organizational goals are fine as tools of accountability, but smart leaders surface more motivational milestones en route to the target. 8. Moments when we display courage make us proud. We never know when courage will be demanded, but we can practice to ensure we’re ready. • The protesters involved in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins didn’t just show courage, they rehearsed it. 9. Practicing courage lets us “preload” our responses. • Gentile’s approach to ethics says we usually know WHAT is right but don’t know HOW to act. 10. Courage is contagious; our moments of action can be a defining moment for others.

A corrupt and dynastic political party is antithetical to the rule of law and to carefully crafted constitutional checks and balances to prevent abuse of power. A tendency towards autocracy and consequent institutional subversion is inevitable with a party thus configured. The result is a prime minister bereft of real power, subservient to the dynastic head and a mute spectator to the loot and plunder of the nation’s resources; a president who is a loyal camp follower and will faithfully rubber stamp the decisions ordained by the dynasty: witness how unhesitatingly President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signed the Proclamation of Emergency at Mrs. Gandhi’s bidding in 1975 and ponder whether Mrs. Pratibha Patil, (besieged as she was by her co-operative sugar factory in liquidation, her co-operative bank bankrupt, and her family embroiled in the murder case of a popular intra-party rival in Jalgaon at the time of her nomination by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi), would have done otherwise; or for that matter whether President Pranab Mukherjee, whose many acts of subversion of the Constitution during the Emergency have been documented by the Shah Commission, is so radically transformed that he would now protect it; a judiciary accused of judicial overreach when it censures the government or brings its ministers to book while its inconvenient judgments are subjected to review or Presidential Reference; a CAG whose findings against the government’s decisions are vilified as being patently erroneous, in excess of jurisdiction and even motivated, although that august body, the Constituent Assembly had opined that as the guardian of the nation’s finances, the CAG was as important a Constitutional functionary as the justices of the Supreme Court; a CVC appointed despite the taint of corruption and over the protest of the leader of the Opposition, whose appointment was finally quashed by the Supreme Court; and a CBI whose only role on empirical evidence is to falsely implicate political opponents and wrongly exonerate the regime’s members and cronies.

interchangeably. There are numerous biblical texts expressing Yahweh’s hatred and condemnation of all people who could be generically defined as witches: “diviners,” “pythons,” “conjurers,” “fortune-tellers.” We know that all Neolithic Goddess-worshiping peoples were identified by the Hebrew prophets and patriarchs as “evil,” “idolatrous,” and “unclean”—and Yahweh wanted them all dead. Christianity’s remarkably ugly record of religious intolerance begins in the Old Testament, where Yahweh’s people are directed, by him, to murder anyone practicing a rival religion. The five hundred years of European Inquisition and witch-burnings had their direct inspiration and sanctification from the Holy Bible, and there is no way to avoid this conclusion. The secular motives, and secular gains, of the witch-hunts, can be credited to the imperialism of the Roman Catholic church, to the equally power-hungry fanaticism of the Protestant Reformists—and to all the other European men who obtained advantage or sick thrills from the torture and destruction of the human body in general, and women’s bodies in particular. The Christian church used the Bible’s divine mandate for religious murder not only to survive the political turmoil of the Middle Ages, but to expand and secure one of the largest and most powerful secular institutions on earth: Western Christendom.

Kitty, I hope... I do hope you feel that you can trust me, like you would your father.” He circled his thumb along the top of her hand, undoing the stone wall she’d so carefully constructed to guard her heart. “We are true friends, are we not?” Friends. “Aye.” “Friends confide in one another, do they not?” A frown pulled down at her mouth, for surely he had a motive in asking such questions. But what?  The gentleness in his eyes, though still present, moved aside to allow for deep earnest as the muscles in his jaw flexed. He asked again. “Do they not?” Kitty nodded, pretending she didn’t notice every nuance of his expression. “Aye.” He leaned forward, urgency coating his timbre. Gently holding tighter to her hand, he almost whispered. “I need to know what happened the night you were attacked.” “What?” she breathed. He could not be serious. “Kitty, I am done pretending I don’t know something is wrong. Who is doing this to you?” Squirming, Kitty fought to keep her breath relaxed. “Who is... who is doing what?” “Kitty.” He moved to the edge of the bed. “I only wish to help you, you must know that. I will protect you, I vow it—only you must trust me.” Tears welled, blurring the wound along his eye. She had been the cause of that and despite her desires to trust, his safety trumped all. “I cannot tell you.” Her voice was flat as the words hopped from her mouth before she could stop them. He stilled, his posture pulling back. “And why not?” She tugged her hand free from his, instantly aching from the vacancy that replaced the warmth of his touch. “Do not ask me.” “Why, Kitty?” His brow pinched and his mouth stayed open as if more protests prepared to be spoken. Her throat swelled until it nearly clogged off the air that reached down for her lungs. She swallowed a groan and turned away. “It is not for you to know.” “It is for me to know.”  The compulsion to open her mouth and expel the awful truth she kept hidden was enough to make acid once again inch upward. She clenched her eyes shut, fear and hurt raging in her spirit like a tempest. “Please leave me.” “As you wish.” She shot her head in his direction. No, Nathaniel! I didn’t mean it!  He strode toward the door, and stopped, his mouth hard but hazel eyes soft as leather. “If you cannot place your trust in me, Kitty, I pray you will find strength to place it in someone.” With

As was the case in Ferguson, the media became as much a motivating factor as the death itself. While cable news talking heads often declare that the media is to blame for mass protests--arguing that if the cameras would go away, so would the demonstrators--the logic is only partially correct, and it diagnoses the wrong root cause. Many of those who take to the street and demand justice do emerge in response to the media, but it's not necessarily because they want to get on camera (although many of the protesters happily embrace the chance to step under the bright lights and speak their piece). Rather, many in these communities show up in the streets because they do not recognise the way their home is being depicted on their television sets. They are upset and offended by what they are hearing and reading about their community. They emerge to serve as ombudsmen, correct the record, tell their own stories. The people who took to the streets were, in many ways, protesting not only the death of Freddie Gray, but also the way his life and death had been portrayed in the media.

Sedition was therefore explicitly intended as an instrument to terrorize Indian nationalists: Mahatma Gandhi was amongst its prominent victims. Seeing it applied in democratic India shocked many Indians. The arrest in February 2016 of students at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on charges of sedition, for raising ‘anti-Indian’ slogans in the course of protests against the execution of the accomplice of a convicted terrorist, and the filing of an FIR against Amnesty International in August 2016 on the same charges, would not have been possible without the loose, colonially-motivated wording of the law.

This solution, while logical, may also in part be motivated by Christian theological concerns. The idea of Q developed in the late nineteenth century in Germany, where Protestants and Catholics needed to find unity in their newly emerging nation-state, and the Jewishness of Jesus was increasingly being negated by the forerunners of Nazi theology

The second mistake is to reduce the religious developments of the sixteenth century to functions of these other dimensions of European cultural change, as if, for example, all the powerful leaders who became Protestants did so merely to take over the lands and influence of the Catholic Church. Certainly interconnections existed, but the motives that drove the early Protestants, as well as their Catholic opponents, are often best explained in precisely the religious terms with which they expressed them—that is, Protestants abandoning the Catholic Church in order to pursue what they held to be the way of salvation, Catholics working to strengthen the church as the only antidote to what they regarded as the spiritual chaos brought about by Protestantism.

Adams was not quite an “ordinary” woman; she was an academic who engaged in a public exchange of views with a Jewish woman and who actively combated Nazism. But she was ordinary in that she was one of the growing number of women who, from 1930 on, voted for the Nazis, and her motives apparently resembled those of most Nazi voters: they voted for the party not because they agreed with everything the Nazis said but as a protest against the government in power.

Adams was not quite an “ordinary” woman; she was an academic who engaged in a public exchange of views with a Jewish woman and who actively combated Nazism. But she was ordinary in that she was one of the growing number of women who, from 1930 on, voted for the Nazis, and her motives apparently resembled those of most Nazi voters: they voted for the party not because they agreed with everything the Nazis said but as a protest against the government in power.

The Christian protest against abortion is motivated by the positive implications of the command—not only does the law say, “You shall not kill,” but the meaning of the law as Jesus set it forth means, “You shall do everything in your power to promote life.” One thing we know for certain is that abortion does not do that. It does not promote the sanctity of human life. The embryo in the womb is an actual human life, so it is worthy of the full protection that we would give to any other innocent human life.

what often prevents people from protesting is not a lack of motivation to protest, but rather their feeling that they lack the legitimacy to do so.

the German sociologist Max Weber (1904) described in convincing detail how the Protestant Reformation produced a new character type which infused more vigorous spirit into the attitude of both workers and entrepreneurs and which ultimately resulted in the development of modern capitalism. […] Weber’s description of the kind of personality type which the Protestant Reformation produced is startlingly similar to the picture we have drawn of a person with high achievement motivation. […] Weber feels that such a man »gets nothing out of this wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well« (Weber, 1904, S. 71). This is exactly how we define the achievement motive in coding for it in fantasy." (McClelland, 1961, p. 47).

The Protestants of old go to work not just for the money, their biggest motivation for work is service to God and man. Not the interest to gain profit or make money.

The Puritan, like every rational type of asceticism, tried to enable a man to maintain and act upon his constant motives, especially those which it g in itself, against the emotions. In

Never trust a historian. Especially Protestant historians writing about Catholic kings. Most of history is only the tale of the winning side, anyway, and they’ve a motive for painting the other side black. No,

Of course the Catholic ethic was an ethic of intentions. But the concrete intentio of the single act determined its value. And the single good or bad action was credited to the doer determining his temporal and eternal fate. Quite realistically the Church recognized that man was not an absolutely clearly defined unity to be judged one way or the other, but that his moral life was normally subject to conflicting motives and his action contradictory.

— Ei nu admit alte cauze! îl întrerupse Razumihin cu foc. Spun adevărul!... Uită-te în cărţile lor: întreaga vina o poarta „mediul" şi nimic altceva! Asta este expresia lor preferata! De aici urmează concluzia că dacă societatea ar fi bine orânduită, crima ar dispărea, fiindcă, nemaiexistînd motive de protest, toata lumea, într-o clipita, ar deveni sfînta. De fire nu se ţine seama, firea este desconsiderata, ea n-are ce căuta! Teoriile lor nu admit o umanitate care se dezvolta istoric, urmînd o cale vie şi transformîndu-se pînă la urma de la sine, într-o societate bine organizata, ci, dimpotrivă, un sistem social izvorît din cine ştie ce cap de matematician, care organizează umanitatea şi o face într-o clipă să devină sfînta şi lipsita de cusururi, fară să mai treacă prin nici un proces de transformare, fără să urmeze calea dezvoltării fireşti, vii, istorice! Şi de aceea, ei, instinctiv, urăsc atât de mult istoria: „Istoria e numai monstruozitate şi prostie", zic ei, şi pun totul pe seama prostiei! De aceea urăsc ei atât de mult procesul viu al vieţii: ei nu au nevoie de suflete vii! Sufletul viu cere viaţă, nu vrea să se supună ca un automat, sufletul viu este suspicios, sufletul viu este retrograd! Pe când la ei, omul poate sa miroasă a hoit, numai să fie suplu, ca de cauciuc - n-are suflet viu, n-are voinţa, e un suflet de rob şi n-are să se răzvrătească! Pînă la urmă ei reduc totul la aşezarea cărămizilor, la împărţirea coridoarelor şi a odailor în falanster!

And, what is most important in this connection, it was not generally in such cases a stream of new money invested in the industry which brought about this revolution—in several cases known to me the whole revolutionary process was set in motion with a few thousands of capital borrowed from relations—but the new spirit, the spirit of modern capitalism, had set to work. The question of the motive forces in the expansion of modern capitalism is not in the first instance a question of the origin of the capital sums which were available for capitalistic uses, but, above all, of the development of the spirit of capitalism. Where it appears and is able to work itself out, it produces its own capital and monetary supplies as the means to its ends, but the reverse is not true.

The 1960s was motivated by repudiation of the old way and the quest for a new way. “Liberation” now came to mean liberation from old values—from the spirit of 1776. This took many shapes and forms—drugs, religious experimentation, sexual promiscuity, even bra-burning, as well as protesting, looting, and rioting. Perhaps most repulsive was the heartless ingratitude and even meanness that young people showed their parents. When frugal, hardworking, patriotic parents saw their teenage children giving them and all they held dear the finger, they saw, with a deep sadness, all that their hard work and savings had wrought. In the late 1960s, from the point of view of parents, America became a foreign country.

Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,” he said. He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.

The Lockean logic of custom suggests strongly that open-source hackers observe the customs they do in order to defend some kind of expected return from their effort. The return must be more significant than the effort of homesteading projects, the cost of maintaining version histories that document “chain of title”, and the time cost of making public notifications and waiting before taking adverse possession of an orphaned project. Furthermore, the “yield” from open source must be something more than simply the use of the software, something else that would be compromised or diluted by forking. If use were the only issue, there would be no taboo against forking, and open-source ownership would not resemble land tenure at all. In fact, this alternate world (where use is the only yield, and forking is unproblematic) is the one implied by existing open-source licenses. We can eliminate some candidate kinds of yield right away. Because you can’t coerce effectively over a network connection, seeking power is right out. Likewise, the open-source culture doesn’t have anything much resembling money or an internal scarcity economy, so hackers cannot be pursuing anything very closely analogous to material wealth (e.g. the accumulation of scarcity tokens). There is one way that open-source activity can help people become wealthier, however — a way that provides a valuable clue to what actually motivates it. Occasionally, the reputation one gains in the hacker culture can spill over into the real world in economically significant ways. It can get you a better job offer, or a consulting contract, or a book deal. This kind of side effect, however, is at best rare and marginal for most hackers; far too much so to make it convincing as a sole explanation, even if we ignore the repeated protestations by hackers that they’re doing what they do not for money but out of idealism or love. However, the way such economic side effects are mediated is worth examination.

While Henry VIII is widely credited with founding the Church of England, and thus establishing the Protestant faith in England, Henry was not a Protestant. His break with Rome was political in both motivation and intention, meant to free him from the authority of the Pope and give him control of the church hierarchy in England, but from a doctrinal standpoint, Henry remained quite Catholic.

During the second semester of 1945, at the University of Havana, Fidel Castro studied law and became involved in student politics. It was during a time when student protesters were exceptionally active. Throughout the régime of Geraldo Machado (President of Cuba from 20 May 1925 until 12 August 1933), university students were suppressed by La Porra (the secret police), and later it was not much better when Batista’s forces took over. Things got very physical when student activists and labor leaders were attacked and terrorized by violent, armed, politically motivated gangs. Frequently, even opposing student groups attacked each other. Castro, getting caught up in this gang culture, ran for the position of President of the Federation of University Students (FEU), a group founded by Julio Antonio Mella (the originator of Communism in Cuba). Although he was unsuccessful in this endeavor, he did become active in anti-imperialistic movements and campaigned for Puerto Rican Independence and a democratic government for the Dominican Republic. His involvement in these left-leaning groups grew, and although he did not embrace communism, he did protest the political corruption and violence during the Grau administration. In November of 1946, Castro spoke out against President Grau (7th President of Cuba) during a student speech, the text of which was printed in several newspapers. In 1947 Castro joined Eduardo Chibás’ (a well liked activist & radio personality) new Partido Ortodoxo, which promoted social justice, political freedom and honest government.

The London psychoanalyst John Bowlby was one of the first to propose evolutionary functions for low mood. Thanks to conversations with the German ethologist Konrad Lorenz and the English biologist Robert Hinde, he turned an evolutionary eye toward the behaviors of babies separated from their mothers.5 After a short separation, some reconnected with the mother quickly, others acted distant, and a few acted angry. A longer separation led to a reliable sequence: initial wails of protest, followed by silent rocking and huddling in a ball that looks for all the world like an adult in a state of despair.6,7 Bowlby saw that crying motivated mothers to retrieve their infants. He also saw that extended crying would waste energy and attract predators, so if the mother did not return soon, inconspicuous withdrawal would be more useful. These ideas developed into attachment theory,8 which provides the foundation for understanding mother-infant bonding and the pathologies that result when it goes awry. Bowlby deserves recognition as a founder of evolutionary psychiatry for his insight that attachment evolved because it increases the fitness of both mother and baby. More explicitly evolutionary analyses in recent decades have challenged the idea that only secure attachment is normal. In some situations, babies who use avoidant or anxious attachment styles may motivate their mothers to provide more care.9,10,11 If regular smiling and cooing don’t work, it may work better to scream indefinitely when she leaves or to give her the cold shoulder when she returns.

It took me a long time to understand why so much that surrounded me was too ugly to tolerate without protest. But eventually I learned the reason. I saw that the conduct of my fellow-men could not be otherwise than disappointing, in fact parasitical and corrupt, and that most of our troubles emanated from a cause which manifestly would grow worse so long as we put up with it. That cause was Capitalism...The motivating principle of business (though not openly confessed), when summed up, meant: "Get yours; never mind the other fellow." I saw, too, that our law-makers and judges of the meaning of the law put property rights first and left human rights to shift for themselves.

This still further and most decisively appears from the grand objection to his doctrine which Paul was constantly called upon to answer. That objection was, that if our personal goodness or moral excellence is not the ground of our acceptance with God, then all necessity of being good is denied, and all motive to good works is removed. We may continue in sin that grace may abound. This objection has been reiterated a thousand times since it was urged against the Apostles...Had Paul taught that men are justified for their good moral works as the Pelagians and Rationalists say; or for their evangelical obedience as the Remonstrants say; or for their inherent righteousness and subsequent good works as the Romanists say, there would have been no room for this formidable objection. Or, if through any misapprehension of his teaching, the objection had been urged, how easy had it been for the Apostle to set it aside. How obvious would have been the answer, ‘I do not deny that really good works are the ground of our acceptance with God. I only say that ritual works have no worth in his sight, that He looks on the heart; or, that works done before regeneration have no real excellence or merit; or, that God is more lenient now than in his dealing with Adam; that He does not demand perfect obedience, but accepts our imperfect, well-meant endeavours to keep his holy commandments.’ How reasonable and satisfactory would such an answer have been. Paul, however, does not make it. He adheres to his doctrine, that our own personal moral excellence has nothing to do with our justification; that God justifies the ungodly, that He receives the chief of sinners. He answers the objection in deed, and answers it effectually; but his answer supposes him to teach just what Protestants teach, that we are justified without works, not for our own righteousness, but gratuitously, without money and without price, solely on the ground of what Christ has done for us. His answer is, that so far from its being true that we must be good before we can be justified, we must be justified before we can be good.

Protest to have a parent A parent will eventually show up to you You do not give up and resume Resume your campaign. You have the right The right to be raised by a parent or parents Parents are waiting for you to be your parents Parents Exist

In grief, there is an element of inconsolability. In our needs, there is an element of unsatisfiability. In the face of life’s most profound questions, there is an unknowability. This fits with the work of Kurt Gödel, the Czech mathematician, who confirmed the “incompleteness theorem,” which states that in any mathematical system there are indeed propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved. These natural incompletions reflect the first noble truth of Buddhism about the enduring and ineradicable unsatisfactoriness of all experience. This is not only Buddha’s truth, it is the one that some of our children and punk rockers also proclaim. Yet there is a positive side. Inconsolability means we cannot forget but always cherish those we loved. Unsatisfiability means we have a motivation to transcend our immediate desires. Unknowability means we grow in our sense of wonder and imagination. Indeed, answers close us, but questions open us. In accepting the given of the first noble truth without protest, blame, or recourse to an escape to which we can attach, we win all the way around.

a marked change occurred between 2019 and 2020. The dual crises of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests ran slam into the twin dangers of Q-Anon and the consolidation of the Trump paramilitary. In 2019, there were sixty-five incidents of domestic terrorism or attempted violence, but in the run-up to the election in 2020, that number nearly doubled, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Twenty-one plots were disrupted by law enforcement.5 Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps. ISIS radicals who abandon their homes and immigrate to the Syria-Iraq border “caliphate” almost exclusively self-radicalize by watching terrorist videos. The Trump insurgents are radicalizing in the exact same way. Hundreds of tactical training videos easily accessible on social media show how to shoot, patrol, and fight like special forces soldiers. These video interviews and lessons explaining how to assemble body armor or make IEDs and extolling the virtues of being part of the armed resistance supporting Donald Trump fill Facebook and Instagram feeds. Some even call themselves the “Boojahideen,” an English take on the Arabic “mujahideen,” or holy warrior. U.S. insurgents in the making often watch YouTube and Facebook videos of tactical military operations, gear reviews, and shooting how-tos. They then go out to buy rifles, magazines, ammunition, combat helmets, and camouflage clothing and seek out other “patriots” to prepare for armed action. This is pure ISIS-like self-radicalization. One could call them Vanilla ISIS.

The war against Perot escalated quickly. The booster club geared up a letter-writing campaign to him, state legislators, and the governor. Nearly a thousand letters were sent in protest of Perot’s condemnation of Odessa. Some of the ones to him were addressed “Dear Idiot” or something worse than that, and they not so gently told him to mind his own damn business and not disturb a way of life that had worked and thrived for years and brought the town a joy it could never have experienced anywhere else. “It’s our money,” said Allen of the funds that were used to build the stadium. “If we choose to put it into a football program, and the graduates from our high schools are at or above the state level of standards, then screw you, leave us alone.” At one point Perot, believing his motives had been misinterpreted and hoping to convince people that improving education in Texas was not a mortal sin, contemplated coming to Odessa to speak. But he decided against it, to the relief of some who thought he might be physically harmed if he did. “There are so few other things we can look at with pride,” said Allen. “We don’t have a large university that has thirty or forty thousand students in it. We don’t have the art museum that some communities have and are world-renowned. When somebody talks about West Texas, they talk about football. “There is nothing to replace it. It’s an integral part of what made the community strong. You take it away and it’s almost like you strip the identity of the people.

When the police fired on the tribals at Muttanga, a large convention was held in protest at Manantavadi, and I also took part in it. I went there because I was invited. When I was called to speak, a young girl came up to the mike and announced loudly that Janu and a sex worker were not to be treated alike. It was clear that someone had made her do that. I didn’t want to create trouble in those circumstances, and so I got up and declared that I wasn’t going to speak. This experience was a good eye-opener with regard to the prejudices that even highly motivated political activists lug around.

There is, perhaps, no stronger contrast between the revolutionary times in which we live and the Catholic ages, or even the period of the Reformation, than in this: that the influence which religious motives formerly possessed is now in a great measure exercised by political opinions. As the theory of the balance of power was adopted in Europe as a substitute for the influence of religious ideas, incorporated in the power of the Popes, so now political zeal occupies the place made vacant by the decline of religious fervour, and commands to an almost equal extent the enthusiasm of men. It has risen to power at the expense of religion, and by reason of its decline, and naturally regards the dethroned authority with the jealousy of a usurper. This revolution in the relative position of religious and political ideas was the inevitable consequence of the usurpation by the Protestant State of the functions of the Church, and of the supremacy which, in the modern system of government, it has assumed over her. It follows also that the false principles by which religious truth was assailed have been transferred to the political order, and that here, too, Catholics must be prepared to meet them; whilst the objections made to the Church on doctrinal grounds have lost much of their attractiveness and effect, the enmity she provokes on political grounds is more intense. It is the same old enemy with a new face. No reproach is more common, no argument better suited to the temper of these times, than those which are founded on the supposed inferiority or incapacity of the Church in political matters. As her dogma, for instance, is assailed from opposite sides,—as she has had to defend the divine nature of Christ against the Ebionites, and His humanity against Docetism, and was attacked both on the plea of excessive rigorism and excessive laxity (Clement Alex., Stromata, iii. 5),—so in politics she is arraigned on behalf of the political system of every phase of heresy. She was accused of favouring revolutionary principles in the time of Elizabeth and James I., and of absolutist tendencies under James II. and his successors. Since Protestant England has been divided into two great political parties, each of these reproaches has found a permanent voice in one of them. Whilst Tory writers affirm that the Catholic religion is the enemy of all conservatism and stability, the Liberals consider it radically opposed to all true freedom.

All this motivates a new “backdoor apologetics”: instead of debating theology, backdoor apologetics wins converts through political science. Any secular or Protestant fan of limited government should be strongly persuaded by the requirements of republicanism to convert to the point of view that uniquely affirms it . . . or else to abandon the position of limited government. And this should happen automatically after he sees that a republic can function only upon the corpus of Catholic presuppositions about the universe! It is time that Catholics, Protestants, and secularists in America affirm how republics and natural rights (along with chapter 2’s subsidiarity, chapter 3’s popular morality, chapter 4’s humanism, chapter 5’s political economy, and chapter 6’s proper science) may only function from a certain point of view. And since proponents of limited government already embrace our conclusion, it is simply a matter of showing them that neither the post-Enlightenment nor the post-Reformation point of view can affirm these things with any internal consistency.

At the core of this ugly period in our history is the idea that who “we” are as a country is changing for the worse—that “we” are becoming unrecognizable to ourselves. The slogans “Make America Great Again” and “Keep America Great” amount to nostalgic longings for a time under siege by present events, and the cascading crises we face grow out of, in part, the desperate attempts to step back into a past that can never be retrieved. The willingness of so many of our fellows to toss aside any semblance of commitment to democracy—to embrace cruel and hateful policies—exposes the idea of America as an outright lie. In the archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, I came across an undated handwritten note to Robert Kennedy from James Baldwin. The infamous meeting after the protests and violence in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, between Kennedy, Baldwin, and a group of Baldwin’s colleagues that included Lorraine Hansberry and Jerome Smith had ended horribly. Kennedy left the meeting suspicious of Baldwin, his motives, and his

Sometimes we fail to understand that those who don't protest are usually in the dark. For example, people who have issues with animal brutality are misjudged by those who don't. Those who protest against pollution are ridiculed by the manufacturing business. Those who lack parking spaces are ignored by those who live in big yards. Same thing with racism. Those who do not understand the outcry against it have never experienced its cruelty. So, the lesson here is that we need to educate those who oppose our cries. Maybe, they are clueless about the depth of our frustrations.

Prayers to deities preserved from the ancient Near East share many of the same themes as Biblical prayers. Individuals sensed guilt and divine abandonment (see notes on Ps 6:1, 3; 13:1; 32:4; 51:1, 5); they felt physical suffering (see notes on Ps 22:14, 17; 38:2–3), emotional pain and shame (see notes on Ps 6:6; 25:2) and loss of friendship (see note on Ps 31:11); and they faced death (see note on Ps 16:10). At times their afflictions involved legal entanglements accompanied by slander and curses (see notes on Ps 17:2; 41:5–6; 62:4). They responded with cries for a divine hearing (see note on Ps 55:17) and justice (see the article “Imprecations and Incantations”). In ancient Mesopotamia, letters written to gods and deposited in the temple also served to bring requests before the deity. The use of rather generic names in these letters, as well as their transmission through the curriculum of scribal schools, suggests that anyone could relate his or her experience with those recorded in these prayers. In later tradition, similar prayers were cited orally by a priest rather than deposited in the temple. Much of the language of these prayers and letters, including the Biblical psalms, was general and metaphoric, allowing these texts to serve as examples for others to use in their specific circumstances. While the details of hardship might have differed, the emotional experiences and theological thoughts could be shared by anyone. As in Biblical psalms, the Mesopotamian prayers include protests of innocence, praise to the deity and vows to offer thanks for deliverance. Often specific attributes of the deity are named that correspond to the affliction and desired deliverance of the worshiper. Such elements function within the lament as motivation for the deity to respond to the worshiper’s plight. ◆ Key Concepts • Many psalms are an expression of emotion, and God responds to us in our emotional highs and lows. • Psalms is a book with purpose. • Psalms 1–2 embody the message of the book.

Women have come a long way , since that day on September 7th 1968 , when they burnt myriad symbolic feminine products , including mops and bras , as a mark of protest . The women wanted to call world-wide attention to women's rights and women's liberation ! Today women are making headlines each and every day as the makers and creators of positive change in all walks of life . Be it as doctors , pilots , engineers , artists , writers , musicians, innovators, teachers , astronauts , researchers, managers , private or government employees , designers , scientists , dancers, singers, entrepreneurs , architects , bus-drivers , nurses , chefs , actors, athletes , politicians , or home-makers , women have been and are continuing to prove themselves that they are equal to or better than men in all walks of life ! A big 'Salute ' to all the women in the world !

Every time there is a protest or a march. They will be instigators and opportunist. Not everyone who is here, is on our side and is supporting what we are fighting for.

The most popular origin story of Christian nationalism today, shared by many critics and supporters alike, explains that the movement was born one day in 1973, when the Supreme Court unilaterally shredded Christian morality and made abortion ‘on demand’ a constitutional right. At that instant, the story goes, the flock of believers arose in protest and through their support to the party of ‘Life’ now known as the Republican Party. The implication is that the movement, in its current form, finds its principal motivation in the desire to protect fetuses against the women who would refuse to carry them to term. This story is worse than myth. It is false as history and incorrect as analysis. Christian nationalism drew its inspiration from a set of concerns that long predated the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade and had little to do with abortion. The movement settled on abortion as its litmus test sometime after that decision for reasons that had more to do with politics than embryos. It then set about changing the religion of many people in the country in order to serve its new political ambitions. From the beginning, the ‘abortion issue’ has never been just about abortion. It has also been about dividing and uniting to mobilize votes for the sake of amassing political power.

History is not a mere record of events, but tries to understand the life of the past. The pilgrim seeking the way to the past must first of all, like Christian at the wicket gate, free himself from the burden of all his present prejudices and even principles. He must forget for the time being whether he is a socialist or capitalist, an imperialist or a democrat, Protestant or Roman Catholic, German-American or Scotch-Irish. To see the scenes of the past he must borrow the eyes of the past. What men did then will mean little to him unless he comprehends their motives, their ideas, and their emotions, and the circumstances under which they acted. One of the greatest benefits derivable from the study of history is this entering into the life and thought of other people in other times and places. Thereby we broaden our own outlook upon the world as truly as if we had traveled to foreign countries or learned to think and to express ourselves in another language than our own. History, indeed, alone makes it possible for us to travel both in time and space.

Once you start that important spiritual housekeeping work, your Imposters will surely protest. Your Victim Imposter might whine: I don’t wanna do the hard work. Don’t make me! Your Egotist Imposter might lament: I already know that I can do the hard work, ergo I don’t need to do it. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone!

The protests had created a countermovement of skepticism, anger and hate, driven by some who genuinely believed that the coverage of Ferguson was overblown and amplified by others with more sinister motivations.

Everything man does, he does out of longing for a better life. Or out of a sense of moral protest.

What is the motive underlying the protest against modern civilisation, against the spirit of the West, and in particular of the Anglo-Saxon West? The answer must be: it is a moral protest. That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilisation, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modern civilisation, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life. That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.

Politics today is a ghoulish deranged soap opera that makes the Bold and Beautiful look like Shakespeare. The intelligentsia influencing purposes amongst the varying publics know the mechanisms motivating mental health and functioning and yet we find ourselves awash with cartoonish career protesters being herded into slothish temporal traps by enchanters who're expert at extracting money.