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Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community is a collection of essays written by Wendell Berry (who may be my new hero) in the early 1990s. I can honestly say that when I finished the last page I was sad for it to end. My jaw was left on the floor. We're talking 173 pages of intelligent, thought-provoking, mind-altering words.
Berry addresses all sorts of topics: agriculture, economy, government, war, sex, freedom, conservation, and community. Topics that wouldn't necessarily be dealt with together. But Berry shows that they are all interconnected and sometimes inseparable from each other. He has this ability to explain certain flaws in our society in light of the deeper issues that often aren't addressed or even associated with the flaws on the surface.
What really impressed me the most was the tone of the essays. Berry carries a humbling attitude, we're all in this together. He was realistic without being cynical, and when accusatory there was not a hint of condescension.
I am still trying to process everything that I read in this book, so let me leave you with this:
The trouble with the various movements of rights and liberties that have passed among us in the last thirty years is that they have all been too exclusive and so have degenerated too readily into special pleading. They have, separately, asked us to stop exploiting racial minorities or women or nature, and they have been, separately, right to do so. But they have not separately or together, come to the realization that we live in a society that exploits, first, everything that is not ourselves and then, inevitably, ourselves. To ask, within this general onslaught, that we should honor the dignity of this or that group is to ask that we should swim up a waterfall.
~Wendell Berry, 1992
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