I took this picture when I was roaming around Evora on our March trip to Portugal. Janet was hanging around the Convent writing and relaxing, and I Ubered into town to look around. In rough Portuguese this bit of graffiti translates out as "too any houses without people, too many people without houses." I almost wrote, "for some reason this really spoke to me," but I didn't write it because it's more than a bit of an absurd statement: I know exactly why it spoke to me. The crime of the gross inequality of the world has always driven, and will continue to drive, my political and religious beliefs. This semester in my Secularism class we read Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age and, among a thousand great points, he proposed that there are three statements in any American argument that (rightly or wrongly, but mainly always wrongly) trump all other and end the debate. One of them is the word "freedom." You can be discussing any issue and if the other American says the word "freedom" it is supposed to tramp all arguments to the contrary and we're supposed to sit quietly and thank God for that freedom. Of course, this is preposterous - not Taylor's point, but this fact. A life where the vast majority of people lives paycheck to paycheck - and ration healthcare - and can't leave their job for fear of losing healthcare - and live in substandard housing, in not one of freedom. My students from my Marxism and the Movies class would immediately point out Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), and I would respond, "You had me at Ideological State Apparatus."
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