Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Time , July 7, 2025  “As a former undocumented immigrant, I know this fear. I have felt it. I have lived with the uncertainty of wondering whether a knock at the door meant separation from everything I loved.” Alberto M Carvalho writes these lines in the latest volume of the Time magazine. Carvalho is the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest public school system in the USA. He wrote the Time article after seeing Donald Trump’s atrocious act of perpetrating a military-like operation on the country’s schools in the name of checking on undocumented immigrants. The result of such an operation, writes Carvalho, “is trauma, fear, and distrust – particularly in our schools, where children should feel safest.” “Every child, regardless of citizenship, has a constitutional right to free public education,” Carvalho asserts. The school is the safest place for many children, he says; it is the only place where they feel truly safe, truly seen. Wh...

Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of one-dimensional existence, back in 1964. A one-dimensional person is a product of consumerism, technology, and conformist ideologies. One-dimensional people are happy with material comforts and superficial freedoms. They are rendered incapable of critical thinking, creativity, and authentic individuality. Hence they fail to see the system’s fault lines and injustices. In fact, the creators of the system make the society appear so efficient and materially fulfilling that all opposition succumbs to a natural death. The system creates the people’s needs through the media, propaganda of all sorts, advertisements and a mass culture. Probably, Marcuse’s concept is more relevant today than in 1960s. How else would we explain the victories of our present-day leaders, the latest being Donald Trump’s. Why would a nation like the United States of America elect a man like Donald Trump as its president? As Ali Chougule writes in today’s Free Press Jou...