A leader in a first-world, industrialized country supports the dismantling of his home country. He has a base of constituents who, according to polls and even (contested) elections, represents a majority of their respective region’s population. Yet his attempt to lead his democratic people into a separate state that is of the apparent majority interest is met with indictments of treason and sedition.

The world stands by and observes with little intervention from neighboring European countries and little to no acknowledgement from the United States. Trump, Brexit, Erdoğan, and Macron. An international establishment and a revolt of those left behind in the push for globalization. A shortsightedness and inability of federal and parliamentary governments to successfully transition from industrial nation states to an intelligence economy and articulate the the growing pains and changing circumstances that accompany it.

If a democratic majority cannot exercise its right to choose, and is rather squashed by a bureaucratic hand fearful of the rising tide of discontent and angst, I ask: what is a Country?

 “Mr. Puigdemont’s televised speech was carefully calibrated and he didn’t refer explicitly to the new independent republic that separatists say was created Friday afternoon—a nod to the legal challenges that he could face in coming weeks. Spanish prosecutors have raised the possibility Mr. Puigdemont and some of his officials could be charged for sedition or rebellion for the bid to split with Spain. Mr. Puigdemont has previously acknowledged he could face imprisonment for his independence push.”

Article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ousted-catalonia-leader-calls-on-citizens-for-peaceful-demonstrations-1509197862

“He writes as though… you can, you can tell he’s from a country unlike ours. You know he grew up in something like… Israel? I think it was Israel. In a country with far less security, you know on a day-to-day basis, than ours. Like someone could end your life right now. Like the AK-47 under the bed. Like anything could happen at any moment – he writes like that.”

I sat there, wondering if she’d read that somewhere in the New Yorker, if she herself was just passing off a professional reviewer’s review. And then I thought to myself, who cares if she did or not, she makes a good point and I nodded in agreement and smiled, “yeah, good point.”

She took her DiBruno bros. bags and left Saxby’s, en route to DiBruno bros. “I’m the workhorse of the house,” she said and I told her it was nice to meet her.

Still not really sure what has happened in this book, though. If nothing else, it’s strange and pushes the boundaries of normal life that desk jobs (or at least, in my experience) can accustom us to believing. In that respect, he’s like Haruki Murakami. Realistic enough that it’s all believable, but so strange you wonder if your conception of life is so limited that you just never considered these things or if it’s all just nonsense. The kind of book that leaves you a little less sure of your whole framework when you put it down.

[Buy It Here]

“…During the next First Turning, potentially the next ‘American High,’ millennials will move into national leadership and showcase their optimism, smarts, credentials and confidence. Sometime in the late 2030s, the first millennial will be voted into the White House, prompting talk of a new Camelot moment. Let a few more years pass, and those organization-minded millennials may face a passionate and utterly unexpected onslaught from a new crop of youth.”

FULL STORY ON WASHINGTON POST [link]

“…if they start to write novels, I will know that I have failed.”

And as I sit in a cozy, pretty café in downtown West Chester, truly one of my favorite places to be, one of my favorite places to think, and to look around for the beauty of the town surrounds me… I think that my moods are really just an internal reaction to my stimuli in the surrounding area. Really nothing more. Or nothing extreme. I’m always me. If I’m surrounded by boring people, in a small suburban town, with my parents and dog, I’m likely to adjust to that lifestyle. And I will be good at it. But the pain and anguish that I feel will be an internal rejection of the principles of that lifestyle – usually the sedentary aspect which is reconcilable to the fact that parents have presumably, and ostensibly, achieved the longings of their lives and now rest upon their laurels either contributing to society, if they have achieved truly what they wanted, or leaching upon it, eternally frustrated at their lack of wherewithal to go out and achieve what they truly wanted. I then generally take a course of action which thinks about the greatest times of my life, of the times when I felt alive, and I look at what I did during those times. I thankfully am a human and have a genetic pre-disposition to scribe my thoughts. So I have scribed my workout plans, what muscle groups I focused on, whether I was doing yoga at the time, whether I was doing 60% basketball and 20% legs and 10% yoga and 10% stretching or if it was strictly lifting weights that week, and I scribe whether I had been reading books, and if so, what kind, and what effect they had on me, and if I was journaling in reaction to them, or what I thought of the author, and whether sleep or action was more important to me, and if I was drawing my thoughts in my journal or simply writing about them, and if so, was it in a punchy format or long-winded sentences, and what was my overall mood, was I trying to be angry when I woke up, thinking that my best attitude comes about when I’m frustrated so I should contrive that reaction in myself. All of these things are possibilities and if I can parallel the dates and understand what I was doing at a moment of high performance, I should attempt to re-create, often to poor results. I often get into it, realize it feels inappropriate for the moment that I’m in – the circumstances just don’t fit – and then I wonder what the heck I could do. Key here is that the assumption underlying is that the circumstance is fixed. When, in reality, that is the variable that should be altered. My tendency is to react to my atmosphere. This is not inherently a bad thing. But, logically, my reaction should not be to take my best actions and to apply them to my current circumstances. It should then be to alter my circumstances, find the right and transferrable aspects of my previous circumstances which aroused in me the ideals of that behavior which I now seek to emulate, and then find a new – albeit progressive – version of that past circumstance. It’s to put yourself in a new position that evokes the details of your being you possess. For seeking to emulate good actions inappropriately upon a foreign circumstance can have the devastating effect of actually minimizing the worth and stripping the luster of the good actions from their appropriate times and reducing them to the value of an inappropriate action. In other words, I run the risk of tainting, of bastardizing, of corrupting that which is good, by being shortsighted to the point of trying to falsely insert them into an incorrect situation. And then all things look bad, and nothing works, and it’s not me inherently that is wrong, but is actually the relationship between me and this set of recurring stimuli that is just not working. Maybe, the logical conclusion here is that my recurring stimuli ARE my mood, and negativity permeating through my life is the result of an incorrect match between my circumstances and me, and the responses evoked by my at-the-moment stasis… And to extend, that if I am unhappy, it may then be wise to first look at the atmosphere in which I’m settled, ask what it evokes of me, and then evaluate whether that may be the root problem. If that is then the case, eradicate the ugly and move onto what is good and will bring about the good I desire in myself.

“We ought not forget, there is something vital and useful in the curious, if imperfect youth – something that shall not be stifled…”

in an astonishingly selfless act of patriotism, He Who Shall Not Be Named offers Himself up as a sacrifice for the re-unification of the people of the United States. He truly does unify the Country, singularly around the idea of the hatred of and disgust with Himself.  In the end, He values the solidarity of the Country over His own social rapport.