In PhD-land, lots of talk about power and how to disrupt it. I have my doubts, even if there are instances of it seeming disrupted, it seems momentary and power just takes a different shape.

Did the Russian, Chinese, French or Cuban revolutions result in eliminating corrupt powers and replacing them with something fair or did power take a new shape?

Following the Ahmaud Arbery case, one of my classmates wrote about the three men found guilty, “Why don’t people follow love instead of hate? Love is easier, better and natural.”

How people view what is natural and what isn’t natural is a humdinger. Is what’s natural what makes you feel good about humanity or is it what we actually do regardless about how one feels about it?

Wouldn’t it be true to say what a species does, is what it naturally does? Cows moo, robins fly, worms wriggle, Trump combs over. We sure make a lot of murder, a lot of hate, deceit, cruelty, discrimination. If it is unnatural then why have these existed in humankind forever?

What is music and what isn’t music? There was an interview with John Cage in the NPR archives and he says he loves the sounds of traffic because it’s an ongoing improvisation. He enjoys what occurs naturally in sound and that didn’t exclude machines as natural, since they were made by humans and humans are made by nature. He enjoyed sound as music.

I bet he wouldn’t conclude the bird mean, who sucks up the innocent worm wriggling to live life. I don’t think those Ahmaud Arbery murderers are not murderers I just wonder if being sensitive, tolerant or even loving are harder to find and therefore closer to being unnatural.