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from an essay in Departures by Joshua Cooper Ramo, author of The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It . I read this today, and I couldn’t help but feel that the revolution which he explains has swept me away, too. I just found out yesterday that I will have the chance to spend next year in Chile teaching English. It’s an opportunity that no one in my family has ever dared to dream of. And it’s an opportunity that exemplifies this new culture defined by revolution. There are no boundaries to how inquisitive we can become, how humanitarian we may dare to live and how life-changing our actions can be. Some say the cultural revolution ended in ‘76. I say that it is alive, well and all grown up. |
Mao was right. Revolution isn’t a dinner party. It is the chance for something better. It is the chance to cook up something out of our dreams, to develop new recipes that fit appetites that somehow are different than they were a year ago, to be decent on a scale we might not have imagined possible. And it’s this that makes this an age of unthinkable possibility, a moment when we can ceaselessly surprise ourselves for the better. We’re not being served anymore at the table of history. We’re cooking for ourselves and enjoying, again, the full and dangerous and unnerving pleasure of creation.
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