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What is Love?

DEFINING ‘LOVE’ IN DIFFERENT VARIANTS

Love is one of the most profound emotions we experience as humans. It’s bigger than us, meaning, though we can invite it into our lives, we do not have the control over the how, when and where love starts to express itself. Maybe that’s why 72% of people believe in love at first sight. 

That’s the tricky thing about love, we can feel it in a variety of different states–when we’re happy, sad, angry, confused or excited–and our attitudes about love can range from affectionate love, to infatuation and pleasure. We even use love as an action, as a force to keep our relationships with partners, or friends and family, together.

The ancient Greeks used seven words to define the different states of love we can experience:

• Storage: natural affection
• Philia: friendship 
• Eros: sexual and erotica
• Agape: unconditional, divine love
• Ludus: flirting
• Pragma: committed, married love
• Philautia: self love

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What is Antifa?

Many Americans may have heard of Antifa for the first time back in the summer of 2017, when T-shirt clad counter protesters, their faces masked with bandanas, showed up to confront white nationalistsmarching in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. In the ensuing clash, scores of people were injured, including a young woman who was killed when a car rammed into the crowd. Since then, Antifa activists have clashed with far-right groups in Berkeley, California, and Washington, D.C., among other places.

Antifa isn't easy to understand from the outside, because unlike most of the prominent political movements that we're familiar with, it's decentralized and lacks prominent leaders. And unlike environmentalists, civil rights or police reform activists, Antifa doesn't have big-picture policy objectives that it aims to accomplish. Instead, Antifa is a loosely organized alliance of people who join forces to oppose far-right groups whenever they show up in local communities.

Antifa, short for anti-fascists, is an amorphous movement, not an organisation as Trump often says it is.

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What is Wikipedia

In short, Wikipedia is a multilingual, openly collaborative online information platform. Like the "wikis" that came before it, the online encyclopedia's content is editable by volunteers from across the globe. Wikipedia has tens of thousands of editors, from issue experts to the casual fans, who can expand, delete, or change information at will. This allows for a wide array of information to be supplied and verified about a particular person, place, or thing. As a result, Wikipedia can function as a great starting point for research, providing users with general information that can be followed up with more legitimate and reliable sources outside of the site. 

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined its name[5][6] as a portmanteau of "wiki" and "encyclopedia". It was initially an English-language encyclopedia, but versions in other languages were quickly developed. With 6.3 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the 317 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 55 million articles,[7] attracting 1.7 billion unique visitors per month.[8][9]

Wikipedia has been criticized for its uneven accuracy and for exhibiting systemic bias, including gender bias, with the majority of editors being male.[4][undue weight? – discuss] Edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women's topics.[10] In 2006, Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales.[11] The project's reputation improved further in the 2010s as it increased efforts to improve its quality and reliability, based on its unique structure, curation and absence of commercial bias.[4] In 2018, Facebook and YouTube announced that they would help users detect fake news by suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles.[12]

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What is Voodoo?  (This History of a Mis-Represented Religion)

Origins

In 64 AD, a great fire broke out in Rome for six days and devastated much of the city. According to the writer Tacitus (Tacitus was a Roman orator and public official. He is widely regarded to have been among the most important Roman historians and to have been one of the greatest prose stylists who wrote in the Latin language.), “Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.” The “abominations” committed by the early Christians were said to be cannibalism and incest, based on rumors circulating in Rome at that time which stemmed from a misunderstanding of the Eucharist.   (Eucharist, also called Holy Communion or Lord's Supper, in Christianity, ritual commemoration of Jesus' Last Supper with his disciples, at which (according to tradition) he gave them bread with the words, “This is my body,” and wine with the words, “This is my blood.” )

This episode in the history of the early Church shows how easily a religion, especially a relatively secretive one, can be misunderstood and misrepresented. A similar case can perhaps be seen in the religion known as Voodoo (also known as Vodou or Voudon). 

For many, the word ‘Voodoo’ conjures up images of magical dolls with pins stuck in them to inflict pain on one’s enemies and the resurrection of the dead as zombies. These images are the result of the misrepresentation of Voodoo by popular culture, and do not accurately represent Voodoo as understood by its practitioners.

History of voudon

Voudon originated with slaves who combined elements of their West African traditions and beliefs with the Roman Catholicism imposed upon them by their masters in a process called syncretism. A 1685 law forbade the practice of African religions and required all masters to Christianize their slaves within eight days of their arrival. Slavery was condoned by the Catholic Church as a tool for converting Africans to morally upright Christians. Slaves forced to adopt Catholic rituals thus gave them double meanings, and in the process many of their spirits became associated with Christian saints.

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Matthew Henson, The Great African American Explorer and his contributions...

Why is Matthew Henson so important? Matthew Henson was an African American explorer best known as the co-discoverer of the North Pole with Robert Edwin Peary in 1909.

“The lure of the arctic is tugging at my heart. To me the trail is calling! The old trail, the trail that is always new.” ~Matthew Henson

Matthew Alexander Henson, (born August 8, 1866, Charles county, Maryland, U.S.—died March 9, 1955, New York, N.Y.), African American explorer who accompanied Robert E. Peary on most of his expeditions, including that to the North Pole in 1909. Orphaned as a youth, Henson went to sea at the age of 12 as a cabin boy on the sailing ship Katie Hines. Later, while working in a store in Washington, D.C., he met Peary, who hired him in 1887 as a valet for his next expedition to Nicaragua (1888). Peary, impressed with Henson’s ability and resourcefulness, employed him as an attendant on his seven subsequent expeditions to the Arctic (1891–92; 1893–95; 1896; 1897; 1898–1902; 1905–06; 1908–09). In 1909 Peary and Henson, accompanied by four Inuit, became the first men to reach the North Pole, the rest of the crew having turned back earlier. Henson’s account of the journey, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, appeared in 1912. The following year, by order of Pres. William Howard Taft, Henson was appointed a clerk in the U.S. Customs House in New York City, a post he held until his retirement in 1936. Henson received the Congressional medal awarded all members of the Peary expedition (1944).  Matthew Alexander Henson was born on August 8, 1866, in Charles County, Maryland. The son of two freeborn black sharecroppers, Henson lost his mother at an early age. When Henson was 4 years old, his father moved the family to Washington, D.C., in search of work opportunities. His father died there a few years later, leaving Henson and his siblings in the care of other family members.  At the age of 11, Henson left home to find his own way. After working briefly in a restaurant, he walked all the way to Baltimore, Maryland, and found work as a cabin boy on the ship Katie Hines. Its skipper, Captain Childs, took Henson under his wing and saw to his education, which included instruction in the finer points of seamanship. During his time aboard the Katie Hines, he also saw much of the world, traveling to Asia, Africa and Europe. In 1884 Captain Childs died, and Henson eventually made his way back to Washington, D.C., where he found work as a clerk in a hat shop. It was there that, in 1887, he met Robert Edwin Peary, an explorer and officer in the U.S. Navy Corps of Civil Engineers. Impressed by Henson's seafaring credentials, Peary hired him as his valet for an upcoming expedition to Nicaragua.  Summary

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The History of Black History Month

Origins: Black History Month is an annual celebration of achievements by African Americans and a time for recognizing their central role in U.S. history. Also known as African American History Month, the event grew out of “Negro History Week,” the brainchild of noted historian Carter G. Woodson and other prominent African Americans.  Other countries around the world, including Canada and the United Kingdom, also devote a month to celebrating Black history. The story of Black History Month begins in 1915, half a century after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States.  That September, the Harvard-trained historian Carter G. Woodson and the prominent minister Jesse E. Moorland founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), an organization dedicated to researching and promoting achievements by Black Americans and other peoples of African descent. Known today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the group sponsored a national Negro History week in 1926, choosing the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The event inspired schools and communities nationwide to organize local celebrations, establish history clubs and host performances and lectures. In the decades that followed, mayors of cities across the country began issuing yearly proclamations recognizing Negro History Week. By the late 1960s, thanks in part to the civil rights movementand a growing awareness of Black identity, Negro History Week had evolved into Black History Month on many college campuses.  President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month in 1976, calling upon the public to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Let's Dig Deeper

The story of Black History Month begins in Chicago during the summer of 1915. An alumnus of the University of Chicago with many friends in the city, Carter G. Woodson traveled from Washington, D.C. to participate in a national celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation sponsored by the state of Illinois. Thousands of African Americans travelled from across the country to see exhibits highlighting the progress their people had made since the destruction of slavery. Awarded a doctorate in Harvard three years earlier, Woodson joined the other exhibitors with a black history display. Despite being held at the Coliseum, the site of the 1912 Republican convention, an overflow crowd of six to twelve thousand waited outside for their turn to view the exhibits. Inspired by the three-week celebration, Woodson decided to form an organization to promote the scientific study of black life and history before leaving town. On September 9th, Woodson met at the Wabash YMCA with A. L. Jackson and three others and formed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH).

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Where did Valentine's Day Come From?

The history of Valentine’s Day—and the story of its patron saint—is shrouded in mystery. We do know that February has long been celebrated as a month of romance, and that St. Valentine’s Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. But who was Saint Valentine, and how did he become associated with this ancient rite

The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred. One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death. Still others insist that it was Saint Valentine of Terni, a bishop, who was the true namesake of the holiday. He, too, was beheaded by Claudius II outside Rome

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons, where they were often beaten and tortured. According to one legend, an imprisoned Valentine actually sent the first “valentine” greeting himself after he fell in love with a young girl—possibly his jailor’s daughter—who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter signed “From your Valentine,” an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories all emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic and—most importantly—romantic figure. By the Middle Ages, perhaps thanks to this reputation, Valentine would become one of the most popular saints in England and France. While some believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine’s death or burial—which probably occurred around A.D. 270—others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia.   (Lupercalia was an ancient pagan festival held each year in Rome on February 15. Although Valentine’s Day shares its name with a martyred Christian saint, some historians believe the holiday is actually an offshoot of Lupercalia. Unlike Valentine’s Day, however, Lupercalia was a bloody, violent and sexually-charged celebration awash with animal sacrifice, random matchmaking and coupling in the hopes of warding off evil spirits and infertility.)  (No one knows the exact origin of Lupercalia, but it has been traced back as far as the 6th century B.C.

According to Roman legend, the ancient King Amulius ordered Romulus and Remus—his twin nephews and founders of Rome—to be thrown into the Tiber River to drown in retribution for their mother’s broken vow of celibacy.  A servant took pity on them, however, and placed them inside a basket on the river instead. The river-god carried the basket and the brothers downriver to a wild fig tree where it became caught in the branches. 

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What is the Chinese New Year and how is it the same as the Lunar New Year?

When people talk about the "holiday season" in the U.S., they typically refer to that period between Thanksgiving dinner and New Year's Day. But shortly after that, another massive holiday brings friends and family together in several Asian countries, with concurrent parties that carry on the traditions stateside. The Lunar New Year, most commonly associated with the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, typically falls sometime between January 21 and February 20 annually. Lunar New Year 2021 is on February 12, and in terms of the Chinese zodiac animal, it's the Year of the Ox. It's called the Lunar New Year because it marks the first new moon of the lunisolar calendars traditional to many east Asian countries including China, South Korea, and Vietnam, which are regulated by the cycles of the moon and sun. "A solar year—the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun—lasts around 365 days, while a lunar year, or 12 full cycles of the Moon, is roughly 354 days.

The Lunar New Year isn't only observed in China, it's celebrated across several countries and other territories in Asia, including South Korea and Singapore. In Vietnam, Lunar New Year is known as Tết, and in Tibet it's Losar. In the U.S., though, it's most commonly associated with what's often called Chinese New Year, the American version of China's 15-day-long festivities.

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Who is Kamala D. Harris, the 49th Vice-President of the United States?

Kamala Harris, in full Kamala Devi Harris, (born October 20, 1964, Oakland, California, U.S.), 49th vice president of the United States (2021– ) in the Democratic administration of Pres. Joe Biden. She was the first woman and the first African American to hold the post. She had previously served in the U.S. Senate (2017–21) and as attorney generalof California (2011–17).  She graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of Law.

Family

Her father, who was Jamaican, taught at Stanford University, and her mother, the daughter of an Indian diplomat, was a cancer researcher. Her younger sister, Maya, later became a public policy advocate. After studying political science and economics (B.A., 1986) at Howard University, Kamala earned a law degree (1989) from Hastings College. Vice President Harris and her sister, Maya Harris, were primarily raised and inspired by their mother, Shyamala Gopalan. Gopalan, a breast cancer scientist and pioneer in her own right, received her doctorate the same year Vice President Harris was born.  Her parents were activists, instilling Vice President Harris with a strong sense of justice. They brought her to civil rights demonstrations and introduced role models—ranging from Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to civil rights leader Constance Baker Motley—whose work motivated her to become a prosecutor.  Growing up, Vice President Harris was surrounded by a diverse community and extended family. In 2012 Harris delivered a memorable address at the Democratic National Convention, raising her national profile. Two years later she married attorney Douglas Emhoff. Widely considered a rising star within the party,. She subsequently worked as a deputy district attorney (1990–98) in Oakland, earning a reputation for toughness as she prosecuted cases of gang violence, drug trafficking, and sexual abuse. Harris rose through the ranks, becoming district attorney in 2004. ***(She was elected District Attorney of San Francisco in 2003. In that role, Vice President Harris created a ground-breaking program to provide first-time drug offenders with the opportunity to earn a high school degree and find employment. The program was designated as a national model of innovation for law enforcement by the United States Department of Justice. ).  In 2010 she was narrowly elected attorney general of California—winning by a margin of less than 1 percent—thus becoming the first female and the first African American to hold the post. After taking office the following year, she demonstrated political independence, rejecting, for example, pressure from the administration of Pres. Barack Obama for her to settle a nationwide lawsuit against mortgage lenders for unfair practices.

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Who Am I?  (How to Answer this Question of Life)

How do you answer the question: “Who am I?” It’s a simple question, but one that’s surprisingly difficult, since it forces you to ask yourself: where do I get my identity. It’s easy to go through life never consciously answering this question, yet at the same time, allowing your search for an identity to drive every area of your life. 

This question, “Who am I?” causes each of us to stop and consider what we’re actually finding our identity. Henri Nouwen, a Dutch theologian, says that there are three main answers that we give to this question.

1. I am what I do

This first answer to the “Who am I?” question revolves around your work and accomplishments in life. For most young people, their career and work is their number one source of identity; that’s one reason we so quickly ask each other, “What do you do?” And whether you’re a lawyer, teacher, or stay at home mom, it’s so easy to use what you do to define who you are as a person. 

The problem with answering “Who am I?” with what you do, is that you’ll be basing your identity on something that will fluctuate wildly. When you get the job or promotion or achievement you’ll feel great. But when you have the inevitable career setbacks, disappointments, and days where you don’t get much done, your self-worth will evaporate, causing you to question whether you have any value at all. On top of that, eventually you’re going to grow old, retire, and lose your ability to accomplish tasks. How will you define your life then?

2. I am what other people say about me.

The second way you can answer the “Who am I?” question is by basing your identity on other people’s opinions about you. Whether it’s how many likes you get on a post, who wants to date you, or how respected you are in your friend group, it’s so easy to base your identity on what other people say about you. 

When you do this, you’ll be happy whenever people approve, encourage, and like you, but the moment you’re criticized, questioned, or disliked, your sense of self-worth will crumble, especially if it’s from a key person in your life. This will happen, because you’ll always have critics and won’t be able to make everyone like you. You’ll always have someone, whether it’s a coworker, “friend,” or an ex who doesn’t approve of you, which will cause lingering doubts about who you are.

3. I am what I have

The third way to answer the “Who am I?” question is by referring to your possession, both tangible and intangible. You may find your identity in your social class, ethnic background, relationship status, education, looks, clothes, or any other material possessions. You look to these markers to show others who you are and how much value you have. 

When you base your identity on having all of the ‘right’ things, you may be happy for part of life, but eventually, one or more of them will slip away, whether through change, loss, or ultimately death. This will cause your self-worth to plummet, depending on the importance of the loss, and leave you feeling worthless and helpless in a life you can’t control.

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