Midlife Meditation

Richmond, California, Police Chief Chris Magnus attending a rally in 2014. It's a philosophical controversy at the heart of the American experiment, running back to the foundations of Christian theology and, before that, Jewish identity. Christian theologians have called it the Scandal of Particularity; liberation theologians call it the Preferential Option. I can put it in a non-religious frame of reference by calling it Focus. What it comes down to is simply this: In the grand scheme of things, does one life matter? Do I? How about you? How about your partner, your parent, your child? Black Lives Matter is a movement founded in the need to translate generalisms into particulars. White American people have been callously killing Black men for centuries. Until the 1960s, hardly any of these murders were prosecuted. The reason: Black lives didn't matter. Collectively, persons of color were given little or no value by the dominant culture. That began to change wi...

Up is relative. We live on a ball spinning in, and moving through, empty space. The direction we call "down" is toward the center of the earth, while "up" is away from the center of the earth, and toward space. Pictures of the earth, whether photographs or maps, seem to have a top and bottom, and up and down, because, as beings whose perceptions have evolved in a world in which gravity affects everything, they are as fundamental as any concepts can be, and as such we apply them to everything we look at. Had we evolved in free fall, up/down and top/bottom would be meaningless. So every map has a "top" and "bottom," even though the reality is that, for every human being located anywhere on that map, "up" would mean "above the map" and "down" would mean "under the map." Our culture, evolving as it has in the northern hemisphere, has tended to think of north as up, south as down, even though to any human...