When I was student teacher at John Jay, I got to teach a class of junior English two of my favorite writers at the time, the Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau.
The writers we read in our young years shape us. At that time in my life, these two New Englanders shaped my thinking and aspirations.
A line by Henry David Thoreau: "Rather than love, money and fame, give me truth."
Has truth ever been more slippery than it's been in the past three years?
Nellie sent me this Bill Moyers' interview with Robert Lifton--a 93-year-old scholar who has written about the past hundred years in a book called Witness to an Extreme Century:
https://billmoyers.com/story/losing-reality-can-we-get-the-truth-back/
Here's the opening by Moyers:
"This being the Trump era, we find ourselves once again engulfed in two realities. There’s the reality of a spiraling global challenge from coronavirus, and there’s the ALTERNATE reality created by the president and his political and propaganda empire. They are spreading a virus of their own, lulling true believers into complacent ignorance with lies and misinformation."
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