I talk to my family every day. But other than that? Yes, Luisa, I have checked out of planet Earth. Nice place. Lovely people. But I have to focus on what comes next.
Neal Stephenson: Seveneves
Schlagwort: Menschheit
Checking Out.
Stuperiority.
[...] throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills.
Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex
Humanity First.
No virus will destroy us; we will first destroy our planet.
Trevor Noah
(quoted from memory)
Dangerous Nostalgia.
Kenya, and almost every African country, was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris, and Lisbon with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart.
Today, across the border of every single African country live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural and linguistic bonds.
At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later.
Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited. But we would still pursue continental political, economic and legal integration. Rather than from nations that looked ever backward into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known.
Naturschaft.
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.
I love not man the less, but nature more.
Lord Byron, cited in Nightwish: All the Works of Nature Which Adorn the World: I. Vista