HAPPY NEW YEAR!
A few days before the end of last year, I started browsing through some of my past blog postings, and I ended up finding a blog post published on January 1, 2017. That blog posting was titled, "Names Have Been Changed." It documented the name changes that my blog went through from 2009 up until 2017.
Initially, when I began writing my blog, in 2009, it was titled, "Abrazos / 365," in honor of Eduardo Galeano, author of a wonderful book, The Book of Embraces, which is titled El Libro de los Abrazos en Español. Galeano's style of writing was to write short, stand-alone segments (each one a metaphorical "embrace"). I was going to try to do the same kind of thing, and was committed to putting out one blog posting each day. That is where that "365" came from. I didn't, incidentally, actually meet that commitment in 2009, but I met it in 2010, and I have met it in every year since then.
On December 31, 2009, I changed the title of the blog to "reflect my continuing efforts to understand the world by seeing it as consisting, in fact, of "Two Worlds," both of which we inhabit simultaneously, and one of which we create ourselves. Starting in January 2010, this blog was titled, "Two Worlds / 365."
On January 1, 2012, in a posting titled, "Just A Little Title Change," I announced my intention to rename this blog once again, and to drop the "/ 365." This was not because I had failed to maintain my commitment to publish one blog posting each day. I did make a blog posting every day in both 2010 and 2011, but as I said in 2012, I just decided to "relieve myself of that commitment." Thus, starting on January 1, 2012, and continuing through December 31, 2016, this blog was called, simply, Two Worlds.
As I stated in that "Names Have Been Changed" blog posting on January 1, 2017, I felt that the year then just beginning was "likely to be a very consequential New Year." We all remember, I assume, who was elected as president in 2016 - the same person who was just elected, again, in 2024. Given the upcoming challenges, I announced the new title of the blog would be, "We Live In A Political World." It seems that this is still an applicable title!
At any rate, I discovered the January 1, 2017, blog posting just by chance, as I was browsing around, and I thought I would like to document one more time the trajectory of the name changes through which my blog has come. That is what accounts for the outline just presented. That January 1, 2017, blog posting, however, also commented on something that the political thinker Hannah Arendt said about politics, in an essay titled, "What is Freedom?"
Given that we have a "consequential New Year" before us this year, too - a year that we can safely assume will be at least as consequential as 2017 - I thought that this statement by Arendt would bear repeating. This observation, too, is still applicable:
It is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for and to expect “miracles” in the political realm. And the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear. It is men who perform miracles—men who because they have received the twofold gift of freedom and action can establish a reality of their own (emphasis added, along with this note that we will, I hope, forgive Arendt's inaccurate use of the word "men" to designate everyone).
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