Celebrate a More Humane Society

(via Boing Boing)

I link to these things for selfish reasons, having very little to do with rooftop gardening.  Aaron Bady, at zunguzungu, sums up my feelings:

I’ll have more words in the next day or so on the choices that are being taken, and on the words we’re using to make them meaningful. Always more words. But for now, I want to remind myself, publicly, that the closest thing to an honorable choice that American citizens like me have is to bear witness and solidarity to the incredibly thing that is happening right now, and to do so as humbly and reverently as we are able to do. The world is changing before us, and we will need new words to describe it if we are to be true to the best parts of ourselves, and if we are to be of any use to a world that we might still find a way to be of use to. We need to learn to listen more clearly. We have corrupted the words we were so proud of inheriting, words like “democracy,” and we need to be a lot better to learn the new words that are being coined right now, in places of which even our own ignorance is something of an unknown quantity to us, and in voices that speak, for example, in languages we don’t understand.

Mainly, I know, I need to be reverent right now, if only for myself.  I am under no illusions that it will do the people of Egypt any particular good for me to retweet links to articles and images and expressions of the righteous human spirit so gloriously on display in Egypt right now — much as I would like it to — but that’s not really why I’ve been doing it. It’s selfish. It is for me, because it’s what I need to do as a person whose spiritual body has gotten very hungry. I want to be a part of something hopeful because I find that too much hopelessness has crept too deeply into the person I have no choice but to be.