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The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam

Bill Walton loved the basketball program at UCLA because it was so tightly disciplined and so meticulously well run, so little left in the hands of chance. By contrast he loved the rest of his college years because they represented the height in personal freedom. He was lionized, but in a very light sophisticated way, and on his terms, not so lionized that he lost his privacy. He loved the informality of the school, the quality of its education, the political excitement that UCLA in the early seventies seemed to be at the center of. Where he wanted discipline in his life there was discipline, and where he wanted freedom there was freedom. He switched early in his career from engineering to history and his grades were excellent.Read more at location 5163

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In his senior year Walton talked with Wooden about his need to smoke marijuana after a game. He asked for permission to go back to his motel room or his apartment after a big game and smoke. He needed this, he said, to relax. It took him hours to come down from the excitement of competition. Wooden said he was absolutely against it. Walton insisted; he was so tense after a game it was costing him sleep and affecting his readiness for succeeding games. Finally, reluctantly, Wooden had given his permission. All right, he had said, but don’t tell your teammates about it.

 Bring Your Own God: The Spirituality of Woody Guthrie by Rev. Steve Edington, Woody Guthrie

I believe Woody Guthrie struggled with the same question as did Gandhi and Jesus, as cited earlier: “Who is my family?” It likely was a painful struggle for Woody to face this question, however consciously he asked it of himself or not. He felt a mystical link to a greater human family even as he surely knew he was coming up short with the families who needed him the most. He loved deeply while struggling to show his love for those who personally needed it the most. Artistic creativity, more often than not, grows out of, or is a response to, emotional pain. How many of Woody’s wonderful songs and poems grew out of a painful emotional and psychological and spiritual struggle he was having with the contradictions he found within himself?

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 Woody Guthrie’s vision for America was not bound up in a particular, hard and fast political ideology, be it communism or any other “ism.” The roots of his vision were spiritual. If Woody believed, as one of his songs clearly indicates, that every step one takes is on holy ground, then all human beings who are taking those steps should be meaningful participants in our earth’s essential holiness. Such was Woody’s vision; he left it to others to work out the details—details we’ve yet to complete.

 Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire by Morris Berman

It’s all a catch-22, because as long as the goal of our society is to advance the standard of living, no alternatives to the technological paradigm are possible.Read more at location 1522

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Humankind’s nightmare of seeing our machines taking control of our world seems on the edge of becoming reality—not in the form of robots…but as an electronically based system of financial transactions.