Hi Joe,
I am English, scratching a livelihood doing internet stuff, web hosting, design and such. As this does not take up all my time I have been following world events with increasing alarm, particularly with regard to America's increasingly psychotic foreign policy. I have often wondered why Americans put up with their government's policies, (I have also wondered why the rest of us do, too) and I am slowly beginning to understand more about what makes it all possible.
Your essays have been an eye opener. I grew up in a working class district of an industrial city in the north of England and got out by virtue of the free education system that was in place when I was young. Some of the kids I grew up with were like your mutt people. God knows what happened to most of them, but I can see many of them doing the same things to foreigners as happened in Abu Ghraib and too many other places. We are all infected with the same psychopathologies.
I am really struggling with this thing of "we are all connected". I know that it's true, but grasping the reality of the truth is something else entirely. Your writings help. I'm going to buy your book when it comes out. You sound like a human being saying the kind of things that a human being ought to say which is just great.
I just wanted to say thanks for your work. It's done me some good.
Mike
England
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Mike,
Thank you for writing. Regarding the connectedness, I am beginning to learn that when it is achieved at all, it is achieved not through objective thinking, but by subjective human experience. Empathy. After that, then words and thinking can be applied, if one can find them.
In brotherhood,
Joe
