A worth reading article in NYT By Joshua Lang

Photo by Michelle Asselin for NYT

Some excerpts;

S. arrived alone at a Planned Parenthood in Richmond, Calif., four days before Christmas. As she filled out her paperwork, she looked at the women around her. Nearly all had someone with them; S. wondered if they also felt terrible about themselves or if having someone along made things easier. She began to cry quietly. She kept reminding herself that she felt secure in her decision. “I knew that that was going to be the right-wrong thing to do,” she told me later. “I was ready for it.”

After S. urinated in a cup, she was led into a small room. She texted one of her sisters, “Do you think God would forgive me if I were to murder my unborn child?” It was the first time anyone in her family knew she was pregnant.

“Where are you?” her sister asked. “Are you O.K.?”

“I’m at Planned Parenthood, about to have an abortion.”

“God knows your heart, and I understand that you are not ready,” her sister texted back. “I think God will understand.”

The pregnancy had crept up on S. She was a strong believer in birth control — in high school she was selected to help teach sex education. But having been celibate for months and strapped for cash, she stopped taking the pill. Then an ex-boyfriend came around. For months after, she had only a little spotting, but because her periods are typically light, she didn’t think much of it at first. Then she started to worry. “I used to press on my stomach really hard thinking maybe it would make my period come,” she said.

Around Thanksgiving in 2011, S., then 24, took her first pregnancy test — a home kit from Longs Drugs. S. (her first initial) lived alone, with her dog and her parrot, and it was late at night when she read the results. She stared into space, past the plastic stick. She’d never been pregnant before. “I cried. I was heartbroken.” Her ex had begun a new relationship, and she knew he wouldn’t be there to support her or a child. She was working five part-time jobs to keep herself afloat and still didn’t always have enough money for proper meals. How could she feed a baby? She kept the news to herself and made an appointment at Planned Parenthood.

Read full article by clicking on the link below;

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/magazine/study-women-denied-abortions.html?pagewanted=all

‘A Commencement Address’ By Joseph Brodsky

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 1984:

“No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what’s known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control. No amount of good nature or cunning calculations will prevent this encounter”

“The purpose of my talk is simply to suggest to you a mode of resistance which may come in handy to you one day; a mode that may help you to emerge from the encounter with Evil perhaps less soiled if not necessarily more triumphant than your precursors. What I have in mind, of course, is the famous business of turning the other cheek.”

“There are other, graver reasons to be suspicious. If the first blow hasn’t knocked all the wits out of the victim’s head, he may realize that turning the other cheek amounts to manipulation of the offender’s sense of guilt, not to speak of his karma. The moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only because suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy”

At best, therefore, what one can get from turning the other cheek to one’s enemy is the satisfaction of alerting the latter to the futility of his action. “Look,” the other cheek says, “what you are hitting is just flesh. It’s not me. You can’t crush my soul.” The trouble, of course, with this kind of attitude is that the enemy may just accept the challenge.

Twenty years ago the following scene took place in one of the numerous prison yards of northern Russia. At seven o’clock in the morning the door of a cell was flung open and on its threshold stood a prison guard who addressed its inmates: “Citizens! The collective of this prison’s guards challenges you, the inmates, to socialist competition in cutting the lumber amassed in our yard.” In those parts there is no central heating, and the local police, in a manner of speaking, tax all the nearby lumber companies for one tenth of their produce. By the time I am describing, the prison yard looked like a veritable lumber yard: the piles were two to three stories high, dwarfing the one storied quadrangle of the prison itself. The need for cutting was evident, although socialist competitions of this sort had happened before. “And what if I refuse to take part in this?” inquired one of the inmates. “Well, in that case no meals for you,” replied the guard. Click link for full article;

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1984/aug/16/a-commencement-address/

Posted By F. Sheikh

According to genetics, there is not much that makes us human; depending on how you count, we share 98.5 per cent of our genes with chimpanzees. Perhaps this is not such a significant matter, given that we also share about 60 per cent of our genes with tomatoes. As this shows, human beings are fully part of nature, and the elements that make us make not just the rest of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but the rocks beneath our feet and the stars in the sky above us.

So what does make us human? It is not that we live in social groups: ants, antelopes and sparrows do the same. It is not that we have nuanced emotional lives: so do dogs and baboons. It is not even that we have language, for other things – including trees, as it happens – have communication systems, too, and it might be that some of those systems are quite complex, as appears to be the case with dolphins, for example.

But in the human case the system of communication – language – is particularly complex and flexible, with great expressive power, and this makes possible the phenomenon of culture. If I were to pick one thing that separates humanity from the rest of the living world, culture is it.

There are two senses to the word “culture”. It is used by anthropologists to talk about the traditions, practices and beliefs of a society in general. But it is also used to mean the art, literature and intellectual life of a society – and it is this that most spectacularly differentiates human beings from all other animals. Click link for full article

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2013/05/culture-what-separates-us-rest-living-world

Posted By F. Sheikh