Category: Practical Humanism
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The Secular Sabbath
Look, we have to stop pretending that rest is some kind of holy reward for being a good little worker. That is just another sedative they sell you to keep you quiet while you grind your soul into the dirt. In my years running operations and managing messy transitions, I learned one thing the hard…
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The Duty to Heal and the Right to Witness
It is a truly remarkable feat of modern governance when the state manages to execute a man whose primary professional calling was keeping people alive. Alex Pretti was a thirty-seven-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA who was apparently so dangerous that he had to be neutralized by federal agents outside a doughnut shop. One…
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The Bureaucracy of Silence and the Terrorist Who Strummed a Shitty Guitar
Sorry for the radio silence. I know, in the age of the algorithmic hot take, a three-day delay is practically an archaeological era. But truth be told, I needed a minute. Sometimes, when the universe decides to rhyme with its ugliest verses, you have to step back and let the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of it…
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From Plymouth Rock to Pragmatic Hope
One must simply adore the Pilgrims. They brave the unforgiving Atlantic, land in a place utterly devoid of central heating, and proceed to define “suffering for one’s beliefs” with an almost theatrical flair. A truly inspirational story, assuming you’ve conveniently overlooked the parts involving mass mortality and, well, indigenous people who were already using the…
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The Absurd Theology of Kibble: Why One Woman’s Lawn is Better Than Congress
It appears I’ve just been introduced to a genuine superhero, though one who mercifully eschews the Spandex and capes in favor of, you know, actually doing something helpful. Vicky from Roxz’s Resources & Awareness – that’s a name that should be on a ridiculously expensive, limited-edition bobblehead. The sheer audacity of her volunteering her time…
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Starving for a Safety Net: The Grand, Self-Inflicted SNAP Crisis
It takes a truly unique combination of arrogance and incompetence to manufacture a crisis of basic human sustenance. But here we are, watching the political class engage in a rousing game of chicken with the dinner plates of about 42 million people. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – or, as the more sensitive among…
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What We Owe Each Other: Beyond the Rules Towards a Shared Humanity
It’s truly a marvel, isn’t it? The sheer, breathtaking audacity of some ancient texts and well-meaning manifestos to neatly package all of human decency into a tidy little list of dos and don’ts. Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t “covet your neighbor’s suspiciously expensive lawn gnome collection.” It’s all terribly convenient, a spiritual IKEA instruction manual…
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The Price of Our Hatred
There was a post scheduled for today, a quiet moment of reflection on the anniversary of September 11th. It was meant to be a look back at a singular act of national violence, a moment that left an indelible scar on the American psyche. But in the strange and unsettling way that history repeats itself,…
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The Ethics of Awkward Silence: When to Speak Up, When to Just Nod.
A well-timed awkward silence can be an act of profound social engineering. It’s that moment at the family dinner or the work function when someone makes a comment so perfectly wrong, so brilliantly ignorant, that the entire room seems to hold its collective breath. You can almost feel the moral tension in the air. We’ve…
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The Compassionate Contagion: How Empathy Becomes a Revolutionary Act
We’ve turned the entire world into a single, global comment section, where every headline is a starting gun and every opinion is a battle cry. But for a great many people, that isn’t a game; it’s just Tuesday. It’s the daily reality of a queer person calculating their personal safety before holding a partner’s hand,…
JUSTIN LOCKRIDGE 