The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Tuesday May 31st, 2022 – World No Tobacco Day
The Economy of Tolerable Massacres: The Uvalde Shootings by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Societies generate their own economies of tolerable cruelties and injustices. Poverty, for instance, will be allowed, as long a sufficient number of individuals are profiting. To an extent, crime and violence can be allowed to thrive. In the United States, the economy of tolerable massacres, executed by military grade weapons, is considerable and seemingly resilient. Its participants all partake in administering it, playing their bleak roles under the sacred banner of constitutional freedom and psychobabble.
Just as prison reform tends to keep pace with the expansion of the bloated system, the gun argument in the US keeps pace, barely, with each massacre. With each round of killings, a script is activated: initial horror, hot tears of indignation of never again, and then, the stalemate on reform till the next round of killings can be duly accommodated. “It isn’t enough to reiterate the plain truth that the assault weapons used in mass shootings must be banned and confiscated,” observes Benjamin Kunkel.“Instead, every fresh atrocity must be recruited into everyone’s preferred single-factor sociological narrative.”
Continue reading HERE!
Dear Gramps #poem by George Cassidy Payne
“They say you
owed money but
who knows to whom”
Continue reading HERE!
Walt Whitman: The Spirit Made Manifest in Words by Rene Wadlow
Walt Whitman, whose birth anniversary we mark on 31 May, believed that democracy can flourish only through regular contact with Nature “outdoor light and air and growth, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warm and free skies.” For Whitman, all nature had consciousness. Man was a link in the evolution of consciousness. Consciousness was more static in plants and trees, more active in animals and self-reflective in man, but all partook of the same consciousness which he called Spirit or Soul. This energy is manifested in all including “the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is” As he wrote “I bear the soul befitting me, I too have consciousness/identity/ and all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth.”
Whitman grew up in the Quaker tradition of Elias Hicks who, as Whitman’s family, lived on Long Island, near New York City and Brooklyn. Elias Hicks placed his whole emphasis on the Inner Light as the source of all religious knowledge. This left small space for the historical Jesus and none for the Bible.
Continue reading HERE!
Always something; the family edition #034 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas
For more Always something; the family edition, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
Ovi magazine
We cover every issue!
