Belonging

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.
-- Anthony Minghella, writer, producer, director

The calculated callousness of the Administration's response to Katrina troubles me. I have a problem with "the disconnect" anyway, as one friend observed many months ago. The "disconnect" he was referring to had nothing to do with Bush or the government, but he is correct and my problem with it is systemic. It seems to me that the greatest challenge modern society faces, regardless of locality or nationality, is isolationism -- on both the microcosmic and macrocosmic level. We are losing our sense of belonging. Some argue that it's already lost. The more advanced our communications technology has become, the more distanced we are from each other. Some ironies I enjoy. This one I do not.

Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, author & physician (not his son, the S.Ct. Justice)

As witty as Holmes's quote is on the surface, it highlights the undeniable trend of the past century of the broken home.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
-- Aldo Leopold, conservationist, ecologist, philosopher

This sums up everything I feel is wrong with free-market capitalism in a nutshell. When everything can be reduced to a dollar amount, then everyone is devalued.