People who want to cling to inherited privilege may dislike the Internet and the power it gives to every human being who learns to read and write. We now live in a world where the utterance of one unknown child can make a revolution. When we gush over things that we call viral we are simply admitting that the world's now open to anyone capable of expression. This trumps Gutenberg. It is bigger than the invention of print.

Fallibility is our signature

We are universally fallible. Fallibility is our Common middle name. Those who divide the world in any way tend to forget the common element.

We all stray. We all err. We all do wrong/ We all do harm. That is why forgiveness is so important. Without it, we could not proceed.

But we must proceed. The passage of time is the context of life.

If this sounds like preaching

Consider this a secular sermon. But it is as newsworthy as the dispatch below which is breaking news according to its progenitors.

This is a casebook example of the change that is underway. FGM is one of the most demeaning forms of harm there is. It is physically agonizing and psychologically ruinous.

It is now a global matter, not just in the UN, where the catalog of the world's harms is carefully maintained, but where everyone can see it.

Democracy will grow

The world will be changed not by soldiers bearing lethal weapons or gun advocates screaming for rights they do not even possess in any fair reading of the US Constitution.

It will be changed by tweets like the above. It will be changed by more and more face to face contacts among the world's people. We are on the cusp of a great new awakening and its theme is Democracy.

The better portion

As a young man, I painfully extracted myself from a successful career. I now see that that pain was worth more than any sort of success.

I have been devoted from the early 1970s to now to an arduous and only marginally successful effort to prove that the thesis of this article is spot on.

Words have the power to change things and it matters not who speaks them.

Memes and more

Short, memorable, pungent phrases are the currency of success these days. The capacity of any small gathering to launch an enterprise with a name and a mission remains alive.

A phrase like universal basic income was unheard before this century.

Democracy can be achieved by making it the ethical center of world change along with helpfulness and tolerance. That is my catechism. If I have any success at all, it is because being universal is where everything is now and I am only repeating things others know full well.
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