Liverpool FC players, united, take a knee for George Floyd and protesters

Liverpool players taking a knee

I salute Liverpool FC players for taking a knee yesterday at Anfield in solidarity with antiracism protesters in the US and elsewhere. They have a fine history of opposing racism in recent years and of working to help people in the community. This timely statement is right in keeping with that. 

There is so much to say about what has been happening in recent weeks. The brutal treatment of Black Americans has come to a head with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In the midst of a pandemic and with forty million Americans unemployed there is an unstoppable fury across the nation that so many people are being treated as disposable, irrelevant, less than full human beings. I am grateful that so many people are saying this is unacceptable and I pray that justice and kindness will prevail. 

About the Liverpool players, it is moving that they arranged themselves on the centre-field circle. 

Liverpool FC players taking a knee at Anfield

A circle in its abstraction represents equality; there is no one higher or lower than anyone else. The players (other than the goalies who're in green) are in alternate red and black strips (uniforms).  This photograph and the reason for it brings to mind these words by Eli Siegel, from a lecture he gave in 1970: 

It will be found that Black and White [people] have the same goodnesses, the same temptations, and can be criticized in the same way. The skin may be different, but the aorta is quite the same.  

Ken Kimmelman quotes this at the end of his powerful, Emmy-award winning PSA The Heart Knows Better. See it here. 

Ahmaud Arbery and the Root Cause of Racism

The savage murder of Ahmaud Arbery has rightly shocked America.  I just saw the video yesterday and found it very hard to watch.  And how many other racially-motivated acts of violence are committed that never stir the conscience of the public precisely because there is no video to record what happened?  

Ahmaud Arbery; Colin Kaepernick 

Despite all the calls for tolerance, for acceptance, despite the many anti-bullying and anti-racism classes in schools, the federal hate crime classification, and so much more, racism and race-based crime continues in America. 

The only, only thing that can end it is the understanding of where it begins, in the self, which Aesthetic Realism for the first time provides. That is what the following important article is about.
  
Read "It Is in Contempt that the Root of Racism Lies" by late maritime captain, photographer, and Aesthetic Realism Associate Allan Michael.  

Captain Allan Michael

#anti-prejudice
#philosophy
#worldview

Victory in Europe Day, 75 years on

VE Day being today, I am glad to say how proud I am of the many members of my family who fought for Britain against Nazism, and who supported the war effort in many ways including as soldiers, seamen, airmen, drivers, mechanics, nurses, engineers, telephonists, and more. 

RAF Spitfire 

Their lives were permanently altered by a second world war that killed millions, and that started just twenty years after the official end of the first. How could the world let this happen? 
As a history teacher for many years I am sure that the explanation lies in the study that is outlined below. And to commemorate the meaning of VE Day, with the fervent hope that the definitive cause of war be known everywhere, here is a short quotation from some of the most important writing I've ever seen:

It was contempt which made for that awful mode of retaliation called Nazism... In the unconscious, dear unknown friends, it is the other person who will have accomplished contempt for you unless you have first contempt for him. 
http://bit.ly/32cyx2k

In this essay, "What Caused the Wars," Eli Siegel has explained the force in self that can have one cold, unseeing, cruel - and the real alternative. The study of contempt, and of the opposing force - the desire to have honest respect for the world -- which are both in every person all the time, is the needed education for today. 

Nazi Party Gathering

    2nd Lt. William Robertson (U.S. Army) and Lt. Alexander Silvashko
(Red Army) after the meeting of the two armies at the Elbe River

#VEDay 
#WorldView

#Philosophy  

Contempt and the Coronavirus

Pretty much everyone in the US is aware of the fact that the terrifying coronavirus pandemic has been used, including by persons high in government, to incite racism against people from China. Shockingly, over the past few weeks there have been many reports of attacks on people of Asian origin in New York City alone. 
What is not as widely seen is that the very existence of the coronavirus is itself in some ways against racism. The following, by Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education, is one of the most important statements I've seen: 

The coronavirus pandemic is a showing of something that people, out of contempt, have not wanted to see: that we are related to all other people; that they are as real as we are; that we have to be interested in their well-being, have good will for them, or we ourselves will be hurt. 

You can read the whole commentary to The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, which includes further crucial insights into how to see this frightening situation in a way that can make one stronger here. And in the same issue we learn about the life and importance of one of the most famous French women of literature, Madame de Sévigné.