Banality/not yogurt

I cannot be without doing.
Do, do, do, that's all I

(click on it)
"men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world."

Do for you as much as for others. Through living for yourself, you can live for someone else.

It is so easy to get caught up in one of these.

Easy to do mostly for yourself

Easy to do mostly for someone else

From this, I can follow my logic with one of Arendt's legacies.

We must first define the "banality of evil," a term for which Arendt is often credited as having coined.  

While observing and reporting for The New Yorker magazine on the Adolf Eichmann trials (held in Israel in 1961), Arendt remarked on the apparent absurdity of evil in human form.

Background on Eichmann: Served as a German Nazi administrator. He is thought to have organized the collection and transfer of Jews and other Nazi-defined social pariahs to concentration and extermination camps. At the 1945-marked "end of the war," Eichmann fled to Argentina and assumed a new identity. 

He was found and captured there by agents and brought to Israel in May of 1960. Trial proceedings began in April of 1961.

Acknowledging the "banality of evil" is to penetrate the notion that evil is a thing of itself--horrible, wretched, condemned. On the contrary "evil" can be committed by anyone. 

Given the pressures of working for the Nazis, perhaps Eichmann's contributions to genocide were an extreme case of "blind perception," or losing sight of the implications of one's actions for others. 

sitting on your hands, not wholly understanding the miseries on them.

the weight of one's situation, one's fear of misery, blots out others' situations, others' miseries.  keep using your hands, and keep sitting on them

so as to match a circadian rhythm, which brings us into 

the day and out 

of the night so

simply.

naturally.

regardless of meter, of beat, of overtone.

the aches of others sonorous trombones but they play into

the rhythm.

it is you are 

the foreground.

Maybe Eichmann wasn't ideologically committed to the "Final Solution," or decision to exterminate the Jews. Maybe he decided to disregard every train car he sent to the camps, rationalizing his job as a necessity. 

just trying to make it for himself. for his financial security.

Millions of lives for his individual well-being.

And this is essentially banal, Arendt argues; evil is done for simple purposes. Millions murdered to put food on the table.

Now, the proceedings were partially implemented for a "rallying cry" effect, or in the hopes of bringing old conversations to the present, broaching forgotten/retired discussions, and promoting consciousness of Holocaust legacies among the younger Israeli and Jewish publics.

To remind everyone of what happened, to evoke decades-old emotions and thoughts from the present.

This is a way of seeing that emotions, events, and thoughts cannot be relegated to a set time period and place. They can be maintained and reborn.

 a benefit of being distanced from events is the chance to take on a new perspective--new, compared to the perspective one may have had immediately following the events.

To look at the Holocaust not from a Nuremberg Trial standpoint, but from one more than 15 years later.

History is not set in place; it is our view of the past given our present situations and ways of understanding.

Arendt sat in on the proceedings, witnessing "history" in the present and offering insight based on her temporal and personal positions.

And so back to this idea of "the banality of evil"

anyone can commit it.

it is not impenetrable or absolute or reserved for "evil" people.

I don't think this is a concept to shy away from or call "depressing." It inspires the individual to remain balance, to look at all sides, to think of actions and events as hydras.

if there's anything enduring about actions and events, about life, it's its many aspects.

Do, do, do, that's all I

but what am I doing it for

and where is my being?

I recommend topping off a bowl of yogurt and fruit with nut butter 

and chia seeds.