Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world....
from The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats, 1919
The middle of the road is all of the usable surface.
The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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21-June-2019:
Marianne Williamson Announces She is Running for President
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Welcome to Hearing the Falconer. This blog promotes independent thinking and political moderation. It also recommends good books that can help you sharpen your thinking skills and think through your own moderate political philosophy. It is smart, independent, moderates who will save the world! Let's get to work!
Marianne Williamson has had a very successful career as a lecturer and writer on self-development and spirituality topics. She has written 13 books, 7 were best-sellers, and 4 were #1 bestsellers.
She has also been involved in charitable work. Perhaps most notably with Project Angel Food which prepares meals for people too sick to prepare them for themselves.
In 2014 she ran unsuccessfully for Congress arguing that “humanitarian values should replace economic values as the ordering principle of our civilization.” I am not sure exactly what Williamson means by this. As a moderate Democrat, however, I believe that we need the powerful tools of free-market capitalism to create products and services and jobs and wealth, BUT we need those tools to be harnessed to the task of helping us achieve the humanitarian values that will ensure good lives and good societies all over the world. If that is what she means, I agree with her 100%.
Williamson announced her campaign for president on January 28, 2019. In her announcement speech she presents some good ideas, and she asks some important questions.
She speaks about the people we celebrate for escaping from poverty but then asks, why are there so may people who NEED to escape from poverty?
She argues that companies cannot be driven SOLELY by profit but also by ethical values and a sense of service to their employees and their communities.
Williamson supports universal healthcare and a $15 minimum wage. These proposals will help to reduce the economic despair that is leading to the authoritarian populism that is already on the rise in the United States.
She supports the Green New Deal and paying reparations for slavery. She actually promotes a version of reparations that could work: set aside $100 billion to be spent as black leaders feel will be most helpful in ameliorating the effects of slavery and racism.
Williamson wants to see “a new era of love for Democracy.”
I like Marianne Williamson. I think she is a good person who has done good things in her life and has had a successful career. I think she has good ideas about the problems America faces and about how to solve those problems.
Regretfully, I think we need a president with more political and government experience than Marianne has. But I think we also need a president who will LISTEN to Marianne, and LEARN from Marianne, and make sure Marianne is offered an important position in the next Democratic administration so she can do more to help is build a better America for the future.
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The "Hearing the Falconer" Library
Books for Independent Thinkers and Political Moderates
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Washington: A Life
Moderates: The Vital Center of American Politics, from the Founding to Today
The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides
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Copyright © 2019 by Joseph Wayne Gadway
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