Sentimentalrobots - All Of These Things

Mattachine Society 🎄

The Mattachine Society was the first gay organization, and this famous photo is of their first Christmas party, circa 1952.

In photograph – Harry Hay (upper left) - from left to right, Dale Jennings, Rudi Gernreich, Stan Witt, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, Paul Harvey, (back of head on left - Konrad Stevens)

Thank you Supreme Court.

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Hugh “Lumpy” Brannum as Mr. Green Jeans, Bob Keeshan as Captain Kangaroo, and Cosmo Allegretti inside the Dancing Bear costume. An early color publicity still from Captain Kangaroo (CBS, 1955-84).

Here is my best guidance for action, rendered beautifully by the great John Lithgow. I first published these lessons more than eight years ago, in late 2016. They open the twenty chapters of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

Millions of you, around the world, have put these lessons to good use; it has been humbling to learn how from courageous and creative dissenters, protestors, and oppositionists.

I am delighted to have this special chance now to share the lessons again. I was honored when John, a wise advocate for civil discourse and civic engagement, volunteered to read them aloud.

For the full video, see my substack.

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

Fortesa Latifi, from The Truth About Grief.