Sublime

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

“Now he belongs to the ages.”

“So we had won after all!” Churchill remembered exulting on getting the news from Hawaii. “[T]he United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.” “[S]illy people” had thought Americans too soft, too talkative, too paralyzed by their politics to be anything more than “a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe.” But I had studied

for the demonstrations but to appropriate a symbol identified with liberty.

The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collecti

Because we so often center history on the exploits and discoveries of individuals, it’s easy to forget that broad systems and historical forces drive shifts in human understanding. While

Hobson’s choice.

original work without the support of the teacher.