This isn’t quite how I planned on restarting my blogging activities after taking an 18-month hiatus (my old blog was on Blogger and can be found at http://acollegialcow.blogspot.com), but I can’t help myself.
Woke up early this afternoon – hey give me a break, I’m a graduate student on holiday – and read that Vaclav Havel had died. I immediately flashed back to my undergraduate days in my Culture & Change class debating the role of the public intellectual and whether or not they should be willing to go to jail for their ideas. I guess this topic and Havel’s writing stuck out in my mind even more because it was one of the few weeks where I actually did the readings… well, that and I liked what Havel was saying (though it’s been so long since I’ve engaged with his works that I’m beginning to forget some of the specifics; maybe I’ll revisit it over the holidays).
Then tonight, my Twitter feed informs me that Kim Jong Il has died, and I can’t help but think that there is some kind of balancing going on in the universe between good and evil – a little comic book-ish, I know. On the one hand you have Havel, this well-respected former leader who put his ideas into action and guided his country through the Velvet Revolution and out from under Soviet-style communism. And on the other hand, there was Kim Jong Il, a dinosaur holding on to power in a crumbling, outdated Cold War communist system, while his people suffered in poverty and fear. And while it might be a bit macabre to suggest that today’s “karma” has been balance, I still can’t help but think that the loss of someone good has been balanced by the loss of someone bad. (Yes, I realize that this is overly-simplistic and that there is a lot of “good” and “evil” in the world and the loss of two person will likely have little impact, but still let me have my fun).
Make’s you kind of wonder what tomorrow will bring, doesn’t it?
andrewblencowe 