Overcome with both fear and despair this past 4 July, I stumbled about looking for some inspiration to help find a path out and away from the retrogressive, hurtful, Trumpian Neo-Dark Ages. I found them in Dr. Henry Giroux's recent commencement address at the University of the West of Scotland.
Illuminating the Darkness in the Age of Despair
"For change to happen, you must be visionary, risk taking, willing to make trouble and think dangerously. Ideas have consequences, and when they are employed to nurture and sustain a flourishing democracy, in which people struggle for justice together, you will learn how to make history rather than be swept away by it."
"Let me end by quoting my first teacher, the great novelist and critic James Baldwin. 'The precise role of [your generation]…, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.'"
Illuminating the Darkness in the Age of Despair, Henry Giroux
Please go here for the full text:
Quotes from the commencement speech given by Prof. Henry Giroux at the University of the West of Scotland, 4 July 2917.
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