{"id":669,"date":"2018-09-10T21:02:24","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T04:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mwenda.com\/PointedText\/?page_id=669"},"modified":"2023-01-31T14:14:29","modified_gmt":"2023-01-31T21:14:29","slug":"apparitions","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mwenda.com\/PointedText\/?page_id=669","title":{"rendered":"Apparitions"},"content":{"rendered":"

We see them only briefly, the protesters at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings.\u00a0 They seem to flicker on our screens, unable to make themselves understood.<\/p>\n

These are time travelers, sent to us with a message from a desperate future.\u00a0 It’s a place where the U.S. Constitution is seen not to guarantee individual liberty, but rather to support a kind of economic feudalism, where the wealthy have the power and status once conferred by divine right.<\/p>\n

Why have they arrived now, and not at some earlier, more critical moment?\u00a0 Like the moment when corporations took on personhood?\u00a0 Or the period when businesses began to adopt religions that allow invidious discrimination.\u00a0 Or the day that the commercial voice grew louder than the voice of the people.<\/p>\n

But what is special about our moment in time is that it is the moment when we fully embrace the bliss of ignorance.\u00a0 We will withhold from ourselves the information that we already possess about the candidate, Brett Kavanaugh.\u00a0 \u00a0 We are ready to agree with him that if our President commits a crime, we shouldn’t even know about it, because of the inconvenience that knowledge would cause.<\/p>\n

Perhaps our day is simply the furthest point back in time that a human can reach, who wants us to warn us about surrendering fact to persuasion, truth to power.\u00a0 Of course it could be that messengers have traveled even further back, and we have been ignoring them all along.<\/p>\n

My friends ask, sardonically, what these people can possibly hope to accomplish?\u00a0 Don’t they know how foolish they look, shouting and waving their signs?\u00a0 What’s interesting, I think, is not what these people look like to us.\u00a0 It’s what we look like to them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We see them only briefly, the protesters at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings.\u00a0 They seem to flicker on our screens, unable to make themselves understood. These are time travelers, sent to us with a message from a desperate future.\u00a0 It’s a place where the U.S. Constitution is seen not to guarantee individual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":19,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-669","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mwenda.com\/PointedText\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mwenda.com\/PointedText\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mwenda.com\/PointedText\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mwenda.com\/PointedText\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mwenda.com\/PointedText\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=669"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/mwenda.com\/PointedText\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1090,"href":"https:\/\/mwenda.com\/PointedText\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/669\/revisions\/1090"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mwenda.com\/PointedText\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mwenda.com\/PointedText\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}