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Innate Human Abilities and Worth

Humans are by nature fiercely creative, intelligent, resilient and independent. These are all relative terms, I suppose, but these are beliefs I have come to largely out of reading Chomsky and thinkers of his ilk and applying that lens to my own experiences. I see it in children. Left to their own devices they are relentlessly curious about the world around them. It's well-known that they go through a phase (both of my kids surely did) where they just incessantly ask "why?" over and over again until you find yourself incapable of explaining something to them that you thought was so basic. Humans are thus an inordinately valuable resource to each other. To let them go to waste via homelessness, addiction, lack of education, etc., is to waste a tremendous and valuable resource. So humans deserve to see themselves as worth a lot. It probably is fair to say that simply being human is enough to earn a right to decency- that means never having to worry about wanting for foo...
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Blame

"The Taliban could solve a lot of problems by just going away. I've been in favor of that for a while." -Noam Chomsky That is probably not a verbatim quote. But Chomsky once said something like that in response to a question about his views about how the United States government should respond to the 9/11 attacks. It seems like a banal statement and requires some context to understand why it rings in my ears to this day, probably about 16 years after it was uttered. After 9/11, Chomsky was among many voices that were criticized and dismissed as a "blame America first" crowd. The criticism was that, despite the United States' obvious position as a victim in the 9/11 attacks, the "blame America" crowd always tried to blame the victim, and not just regarding the 9/11 attacks and an appropriate response. The criticism had some truth and it also almost completely missed the point, illustrated by Chomsky in the Taliban quote. We only have control o...
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Noam Chomsky is Not Dead

As of this writing, Noam Chomsky is not dead. I do not want him to be dead. I am 37-years-old. For almost 20 years, Noam Chomsky has been an intellectual lighthouse to me. Sometimes I was close. Sometimes I was far away. But, intellectually, it felt like he was always guiding me to harbor. Noam Chomsky is in his early 90s, now. As with all of us, his death is inevitable. It may seem morbid, but, when it has felt like you have only one great light guiding you home, you want to prepare for when that great light goes out. This blog is my attempt retrace and understand what Noam Chomsky means to me. A lot of people I know have never heard of him other than from me. Those that have- most of them regard him with some level of suspicion. Even people who once embraced him and his thinking as fully as I did have recently told me he is "on the outs" with them over what he has said regarding this issue or that. It is not simply that I always think Noam Chomsky is right. It is that...
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