“The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence…” ~Toni Morrison, 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature This segment of Creative Flexibility and Annihilated Lives is published in partnership with Voices Compassion Education . Like many authors I dive headlong almost every  day into a torrential flow of words sparkling with possibilities. I then work  to extract from that linguistic flow a collective of sounds, imagery, ideas,  and entire compositions capable of offering relevant reflections of the world  experienced both inside and outside my own head. Such a mindful exercise in  disciplined creative passion tends to focus my thoughts more on striking a  balance between the unyielding clarity of prose and the seductive allusiveness of  poetry than on the demands of managing a public image. 

“It is difficult to listen to [Michael Jackson’s] ‘Do You Know Where Your Children Are’ without thinking about the ongoing #BringBackOurGirls campaign.” –Article Excerpt (Aberjhani) What television audiences experienced with the debut of “Slave to the Rhythm” was Mr. Jackson as transhumanist art in its more positive and inspiring holographic form. Anyone who finds that statement unsettling probably should not. At least one potential definition of transhumanist art is the creative representation of a person, such as in a work of visual art or literature, which utilizes advanced technologies (or allusion to such technologies) to symbolize humanity as an enhanced species closer to cyborgs or angels than to apes. In its broader philosophical framework, transhumanism is a futuristic ideology that studies both the likely pitfalls and potential benefits of employing technology to enhance the physical, intellectual, and overall psychic capacities of human beings. If you accep

                     Nigeria and Mother's Day illustration by John Cole for The Times-Tribune . When confronted by something too painful, incredulous, or monstrous to believe, a person will sometimes say, “I  couldn't  even wrap my head around that!” Such was probably one of the main reasons the international community took so long to respond in any meaningful way to the abduction of the almost 300 Chibok school girls in Nigeria. The emotional impact was, and is, not completely unlike that of seeing for the first time a film clip of the aircraft exploding against the Twin Towers on 9/11. It was an image unprecedented in one’s mental model of what reality is supposed to be and therefore an image one was not able to immediately process.   Who could believe that an army of armed adult men would attack and abduct nearly 300 school girls in the middle of the night? Moreover, in retrospect, why were the girls left in such a vulnerable position in the first place?  F