My Thoughts
I received another book this afternoon: John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty originally published in 1859. I can hear the critics complaining, “Too old, outdated, why waste your time?” Perhaps, it is because I am old, though not quite that old; perhaps because I have been told that I am outdated, a relic of another time; or perhaps it is because I have the time to waste and thoroughly enjoy old, outdated essays. Personally, I believe I am on solid ground here, thoroughly convinced that we have much to learn from what has come before; history does repeat itself, you know.
My Thoughts
Ran into an intriguing thought, yesterday, “If you don’t fight for what you want, don’t cry for what you lost.” Funny thing, when I ran across it, I was asking myself something similar, “What are you fighting for?”
My Thoughts
These days I am reminded of a phrase now more than four centuries old, first mentioned in the classic tale The Ingenious Knight of La Mancha or more familiarly Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605, 1615). The phrase that comes to mind is “tilting at windmills” which surely must be an aphorism inexplicably baffling for minds critically indoctrinated by the modern public school system. Tilting, for students of more than a few decades past, is another word for jousting, which of course, to the fundamentally illiterate mind, is as odd a word as the former, just as chivalry, morality, honor, and fighting for noble causes are no longer sanctioned virtues by the hive mind. After all, though there were weapons mentioned in the tale, no mention was made of AR-15s, high-capacity magazines, or automatic weapons. All that aside, to ‘tilt at windmills’ is to attack imaginary enemies. It is that simple, and yet, too complex a concept for anyone who fathoms 2 + 2 = 4 as racist, phobic (there are too many phobias to list), whatever sinks your canoe, unplugs your peloton, or burns your tommy johns.