one man's words

All this crying over how much this Yahoo acquisition will ruin Tumblr is a predictable part of the cycle of tech company acquisitions these days — no matter how smart or dumb the buy — and says nothing about how the impending marriage will do.

She’s hitting Asheville Feb 1 with Casey Driessen and I really want to go.

Fun side story: In my first post-college job, after seeing Ben Sollee and Casey Driessen perform as part of the Sparrow Quartet, I helped arrange a concert with Ben and Carrie Rodriguez. They’d had a successful touring stint together, and I wanted Triangle audiences to experience it.

The date was set for when I would be on my honeymoon. Totally bummed.

So I’ve seen Ben live (multiple times). I’ve seen Casey live once. I’ve never seen Carrie live. This needs to happen.

Read every single word. It gets better with every sentence.

Really, all you need to read is the lede, which is basically the best lede ever written in journalism history:

CARRBORO — Roy Mars was peeing in his compost last weekend – it adds nitrogen – when he looked up and saw something streak across the sky.

Because I kind of think we all need to read this. Just in case, you know? And if you’re too lazy or too proud to read 10 small paragraphs, here’s the takeaway section:

Over time, we in the US tend to do OK. We’ve made serious mistakes as a country, sometimes dodging apocalypse or genocide by a combination of luck and sheer bloodymindedness. We’ve let our government take action in gruesome ways – internment camps, Vietnam, Iraq. And, as citizens, we’ve stood by while injustices rolled over other people’s lives (this individualized list is too painful and too long to articulate).

But we tend to learn from our mistakes; we tend to correct them, as best we can. Our always re-enforced self-interest and offhand sense of fairness produces a kind of lazy arc toward justice. Frustration and outrage bring wars to an end (“We’re still in Iraq? Why?”). Protest and disenchantment with pursuing a failing cause allow rights to expand (“I’m not going to get up off the couch to keep gays from marrying”).

Romney’s vision of the America in the rearview mirror is a comparatively lonely one. Nostalgia only beckons those who haven’t seen progress. Women don’t want a return to a time when they couldn’t sit in a boardroom without holding a steno pad, or only have control over their bodies if no one knew about it. Black people don’t want to roll the clock back to racial double-vision and divide. Gay men and women don’t want to give up the simple gift of visibility (or even the right to serve in the military).

And however much a Romney administration might push for policies that inch us toward the past, such moves will find resistance. The No 1 force moving America forward is the inertia of tiny gains. But, by golly, those add up: there’s a black man in the White House – and that can never ever be undone.

h/t hungryheel

Yes, it’s motivated by money and not by, y’know, what’s right and good and decent. But maybe it’s a start…