On her way to work one morning

Down the path along the lake

A tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake.

His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew.

"Oh well," she cried, "I’ll take you in, and I’ll take care of you."

"Take me in oh tender woman

Take me in, for heaven’s sake

Take me oh tender woman," sighed the broken snake.

She wrapped him up all cozy in a curvature of silk

Then laid him by the fireside with honey and some milk

Now she hurried home from work that night as soon as she arrived,

She found that pretty snake she’d take in had been revived. She was happy.

"Take me in, oh tender woman.

Take me in, oh heaven’s sake.

Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the broken snake.

Now she clutched him to her bosom, "You’re so beautiful," she cried.

"But if I hadn’t brought you in by now, heavens, you might have died."

Now she stroked his pretty skin and then she kissed him and held him tight.

But instead of saying thank you, that snake gave her a vicious bite!

"Take me in, oh tender woman,

Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the vicious snake.

"I saved you," cried that woman,

"And you bit me heavens why?

You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die!"

"Oh shut up, silly woman," said the reptile with a grin.

"You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in."

--Al Wilson, The Snake

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

--Billie Holliday, Strange Fruit

Be calm; for only by calmly considering our lives can we achieve our purpose to live together — be calm — love me — Today — yesterday — what tearful longing for you — for you — you — my life — my all — all good wishes to you — Oh, do continue to love me — never misjudge your lover’s most faithful heart.

every yours

every mine

ever ours

--Beethoven to his Immortal Beloved

“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”  --Seneca

When empathy thins, division pays

One of the first casualties of structural overload is our collective emotional intelligence. Empathy is not a soft add-on or a private virtue. It is intensive work for the brain and basic infrastructure for any humanist society. It demands time, safety and a certain inner spaciousness to imagine another person’s reality and let it matter.

When people live in mental survival mode for years, that space collapses. The nervous system quietly reorders its priorities. Protect your own. Shrink your circle. Save energy. You do not stop caring in principle, but in practice there is less left over. Everyday kindness becomes harder. The benefit of the doubt becomes rarer. The social fabric that once held different lives together wears down thread by thread.

This is the emotional ground modern populism builds on. When empathy is weakened, it becomes far easier to sort people into “us” and “them”, to blame rather than understand, to see your own security as dependent on someone else’s loss. The same forces that drain our cognitive capacity also drain our willingness to see complexity in other human beings.

Populism does not need to create fear and anger; those feelings are already produced by economic insecurity, climate anxiety and the attention economy. What populism does is give these feelings a target. Migrants. “Elites”. Welfare recipients. Environmentalists. Brussels. Any group will do, as long as it can be painted as the reason why you feel unsafe and exhausted.

The rise of polarization is not a bug in the system. It is a business model built on exhausted minds. A population with weakened empathy will not instinctively search for common ground. It will look for someone to blame.

For climate and justice politics this is disastrous. Any serious transition requires trust, patience and a willingness to share burdens in a way that feels fair. A society running on thin emotional and cognitive margins will not automatically choose fairness. It will choose apparent simplicity. It will choose whoever promises quick relief and a clear scapegoat.

--Frode Kjærvik, excerpt from When a Civilization Wears Down Its Own Mind 

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”  --Ocean Vuong

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”  --Ursula K. Le Guin