Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Old, Female, and Homeless
The doors of the Mission Neighborhood Health Center in San Francisco don’t open until 7 a.m., but on the Saturday morning I was there, a dozen or so people were already lined up by 5:30 a.m.. The group included a middle-aged white man who had lost his job managing a high-end restaurant and a black…
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Learning English and U.S. Culture Through Service and Social Justice Education
Foreign students who come to the United States for college often need to improve their English skills and learn more about U.S. culture. Julie Miller’s students are doing just that. They learn through service, as they venture beyond their Northeastern University classroom to volunteer at several sites around Boston. The academic course, entitled “Global Experience,”…
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This Is a Tragedy
Last Friday night, after news reports that one suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings had been killed and another was captured, the media became fixated on crowds of Bostonians taking to the streets to “celebrate.” There is nothing to celebrate. This week has been a tragedy at every level. It began with the horrific bombings…
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After the Bombings, We Need Justice . . . and Democracy
Like everyone else in the Boston area, the Open Media Boston staff is still numb with shock at the news that a vicious explosive attack was perpetrated by forces unknown against innocent civilians at the Boston Marathon just last week. Three people are dead as of this writing — one of them an eight-year-old boy.…
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How About Our Mental Health System?
You can’t turn on the news today without hearing about the debate on gun control. With our nation divided between regulating the sales of firearms and our second amendment, where we stand in regards to laws in the coming months is still up in the air. One thing that is not being talked about is…
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In the Blink of an Eye
“ The Marathon, are you kidding me,” That’s what I wrote on my Facebook page as I watched the events unfolding on TV the day of April 15, Patriots Day. I felt the same way as I felt on Sept 11: that I must be watching some type of movie. This couldn’t be real, but…
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Bullets
Listening to the news about the broken bodies in a school, I was waiting for my wife not taking anything for granted. have we gone too far, are there too many of us, a behavioral sink, that we turn on each other, gun in hand, weapon in hand, innocent eyes burning with blood, tears in…
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Our Chemical Romance
There are 85,000 synthetic chemicals in our midst, introduced into the environment since the Second World War. Over 216 everyday chemicals have proven correlations to breast cancer, and yet only 7% of the 3,000 in high production have been tested for detrimental effect. It is hard to comprehend a process where a blanket tsunami of…
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Worlds Apart
It’s a complicated thing to shift base from where you have stayed all your life and move to a foreign country to start life over, anew and clueless. Except, I wasn’t really starting over when I moved to the United States in August, 2011. I couldn’t see it back then, as the excitement of independence…
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Keeping the Hope Alive through Trauma
The following series of essays have been written while teaching ESL classes to adult students from all corners of the world (this writing exercise began in late January, and continues to be a part of my classes). Each morning, I required the first class – which was what inspired this project – to answer one…
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