Watching someone be evicted

Across the street from where I work there are several apartment buildings. Last night, one of the tenants was forcibly evicted. I don't know the details, don't know if the sherrif came and pushed her out or what, but this morning as I walked down from the car park to the office all of her stuff was arrayed along the sidewalk and several people were picking through it like vultures. Apparently, according to a man who was doing a very poor job of defending her property-- he just sat there and watched as people walked off with cheap paintings of big-eyed kittens and ancient chunks of stereo equipment-- she slept that night on the sidewalk on the mattress that had been tossed out with everything else.

It's seeing things like that that make me grateful that Omaha and I have worked so hard, held on with everything we've got, and establish a stable and happy home for our daughter. I felt so profoundly sad at seeing the sum total of this woman's material life cast out into the street like that.

English as Lingua Franca

Apparently, the "common speech" of Europe now has a name: ELF. English as Lingua Franca. Timothy Ash refers to it in his essay, The Banality of Good, in which he writes: "It is the banality of the good that has Vladimir and Maria making love not war, while comparing notes, in Elf, about the latest American movie."

Ash's essay is interesting because he makes a point: Europe is uniformly banal. It has no great evil to resist, and so there is no need for great good to rise. Only the banal, ordinary kind of goodness remains: don't cheat on your job, your neighbor, or your wife, be kind to your children, study hard.

The end of history will be a very sad time, partly because the things that once called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism will be replaced by economic calculation, and partly because in the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.
--Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man

Bring it on.