31 May 2006

- Freedom of "Choice" -

Why is it that the larger the grocery stores, the fewer the real choices available on the shelves?

Ten thousand different kinds of pre-cooked (high-fat, high-sodium) burgers, three thousand different chips and soft drinks, six hundred and fifty "new and improved" eighteen-bladed razors; but you can hardly find a decent loaf of bread, much less 10 lb bags of flour (don't even think about looking for 25 lb. bags) or such "exotic" items as kosher salt or good (i.e., non-canned) olives.

I wish I lived close enough to a co-op or small, local grocer to make it economical to shop at regularly. But I don't. Sigh. The choice of the suburbs is to have no choice at all.

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Daybreak

Email: jwb2005 @ gmail dot com

Here [in Fidelio] and nowhere else music becomes a rosy dawn, militant religious, the dawning of a new day so audible that it seems more than simply hope. It shines forth as the pure work of Man, as one which had not appeared in the world surrounding Beethoven, a world that existed irrespective of men. Thus music as a whole stands at the farther limits of humanity, but at those limits where humanity, with new langauge and haloed by the call to achieved intensity, to the attained world of "we," is first taking shape. And this ordering in our musical expression means a house, indeed a crystal, but one derived from our future freedom: a star, but one that will be a new Earth.

—Ernst Bloch
The Principle of Hope