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Spirit Matters: ‘No time for despair,’ in seeking to heal civilization · Illinois Valley - Shaw Local

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  Speaker 1: Spirit Matters. No time for despair in seeking to heal
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  Speaker 1: Civilization Written by Jerald Zavada Novak and Spirit Matters. This
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  Speaker 1: article is being read by an automated voice brought to
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  Speaker 1: you by Everlett. This is precisely the time when artists
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  Speaker 1: go to work. There is no time for despair, no
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  Speaker 1: place for self pity, no need for silence, no room
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  Speaker 1: for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That
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  Speaker 1: is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised
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  Speaker 1: and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore
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  Speaker 1: its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb
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  Speaker 1: to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can
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  Speaker 1: lead to knowledge, even wisdom. Like art Tony Morrison. I
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  Speaker 1: have long been inspired by this opening quotation from the
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  Speaker 1: late Pulitzer Prize winning author Tony Morrison, which was published
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  Speaker 1: on March twenty third, twenty fifteen. Morrison wrote of her
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  Speaker 1: despair after the election of George W. Bush and how
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  Speaker 1: an artist friend told her that times like these are
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  Speaker 1: when artists must recommit themselves to using their work to
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  Speaker 1: grow a civilized society. In fact, over the last ten
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  Speaker 1: plus years, I have turned to Morrison's words often when
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  Speaker 1: I have been near despair at the daily barrage of criminality, destruction,
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  Speaker 1: and rollbacks to environmental protections coming from the highest offices
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  Speaker 1: in our country. These words are a call to arms
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  Speaker 1: for honorable truth and justice seeking souls with public platforms.
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  Speaker 1: They remind us our gifts to write and create bear
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  Speaker 1: with them a sacred duty and responsibility to use them
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  Speaker 1: for the greater good, especially when objective truth and morals
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  Speaker 1: have been prostituted into alternative facts by those with less
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  Speaker 1: than honorable intentions. In fact, Morrison points out, our work
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  Speaker 1: is so important that when dictators, tyrants, and fascists take control,
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  Speaker 1: censorship and targeted harassment of writers and artists is usually
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  Speaker 1: at the top of their agenda. They want porter removed
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  Speaker 1: from public access facts and ideas that threatened the lies
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  Speaker 1: they use to gain power. Dictators and tyrants routinely begin
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  Speaker 1: their reigns and sustain their power with the deliberate and
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  Speaker 1: calculated destruction of art, the censorship and book burning of
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  Speaker 1: unpoliced prose, the harassment and detention of painters, journalists, poets, playwrights, novelists, essayists.
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  Speaker 1: This is the first step of a despot whose instinctive
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  Speaker 1: acts of malevolence are not simply mindless or evil. They
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  Speaker 1: are also perceptive. Such despots know very well that their
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  Speaker 1: strategy of repression will allow the real tools of oppressive
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  Speaker 1: power to flourish. We have seen direct attacks on freedom
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  Speaker 1: of the press and freedom of speech. Happened in the
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  Speaker 1: last year with the cancelation by CBS of The Late
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  Speaker 1: Show with Stephen Colbert for financial reasons, despite Colbert consistently
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  Speaker 1: ranking at the top of Late Night ratings, and the
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  Speaker 1: Federal Trade Commission threatened ABC if they did not fire
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  Speaker 1: Jimmy Kimmel, whose Late Night mondait cut a little too
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  Speaker 1: close to the bone for at least one of our
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  Speaker 1: government leaders. Though Colbert's show was canceled, he continued to
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  Speaker 1: use his platform to shine a light on truths hidden
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  Speaker 1: by corporate media, and when Kimmel's viewers protested his firing
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  Speaker 1: by mass canceling subscriptions to Disney Plus, ABC relented. Disney
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  Speaker 1: is the parent company of ABC. Kimmel's show remains in production,
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  Speaker 1: and like Colbert, he is not backed down from speaking
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  Speaker 1: truth to power. In addition, key anchors and producers at
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  Speaker 1: CBS's longtime stalwart news magazine sixty Minutes have been fired.
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  Speaker 1: Scott Pelley, who has earned multiple prestigious journalism awards, was
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  Speaker 1: fired after alleging editors told him to remove critical references
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  Speaker 1: potentially harmful to government officials from his reports. Anderson Cooper,
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  Speaker 1: a longtime contributor to sixty Minutes, left after the controversial
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  Speaker 1: leadership changes at CBS News tied to Pelly's allegations. The
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  Speaker 1: truth is, journalistic integrity at major news broadcasting entities these
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  Speaker 1: days is not what it used to be. Viewers are
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  Speaker 1: consistently being fed incomplete and often biased information, and the
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  Speaker 1: hands of journalists that work for these entities are often
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  Speaker 1: tied unless they choose to leave of their own volition.
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  Speaker 1: We are seeing a marked increase in trusted journalist independently
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  Speaker 1: establishing a presence online. Don Lemon, Jim Acosta, and Katie
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  Speaker 1: Koric are just a few examples. Younger generations are following suit.
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  Speaker 1: Aaron Parnas, a law school graduate and journalist, has been
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  Speaker 1: probing the Epstein files and the circumstances surrounding Mitch McConnell's
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  Speaker 1: absence from the Senate. Parnas alleges threats against him have
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  Speaker 1: increased as he has continued to dig into these cases.
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  Speaker 1: In rereading Morrison's words, I keep returning to that is
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  Speaker 1: how civilizations heal. There can be no argument that what
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  Speaker 1: is left of our civilization is in need of deep healing,
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  Speaker 1: not just for the inhumane policies that we live with,
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  Speaker 1: but more importantly, the deep divide in ideologies among Americans.
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  Speaker 1: Will we ever recover a sense of civilized, non defensive
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  Speaker 1: discourse in this generation. Will we ever be able to
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  Speaker 1: look at our neighbors again with open hearts, regardless of
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  Speaker 1: their political views. We must. We can do this, as
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  Speaker 1: Morrison wrote, by refusing to succumb to the world's malevolence
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  Speaker 1: while mining the chaos around us for information that can
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  Speaker 1: lead to knowledge and wisdom. We gain knowledge and wisdom
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  Speaker 1: by doing language, by reading, writing, and speaking up for
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  Speaker 1: truth and justice, no matter the cost. Spirit Matters is
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  Speaker 1: a weekly column by Jerlyn Zavada Novak that examines experiences
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  Speaker 1: common to the human spirit. Contact her at jay Z
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  Speaker 1: Blue three three at yahoo dot com.