After dinner we played a card game that included our almost-five year old grand daughter. A simple game, called “Go Fish” was played with intense delight by the child. The game is a matter of alphabet matching. She is learning the letters of the alphabet. Her pleasure visibly grows as she masters the rules…
Tonight the debate between the Republican and the Democratic candidate is to be televised on ABC. It is difficult to imagine two personalities of starker contrast. Most Americans have already made a choice. Perhaps you are sympatico with a life-long bully, a male who has made his way by grift. He is an icon…
How could it be otherwise? Our sense of time, of the texture of change, – is of-our-species of mammal. When I was a child with my sister in the back seat of our car, I remember those trips to visit with my grand parents. The hour and a half drive felt interminable. More than…
A festival, a fair has always been the occasion for my happiness. I remember as a child being taken to a circus, or that feeling of excitement on a chill December evening, waiting curbside for the first sound and sight of the Christmas parade,… Such events caused me to feel happy for a while….
Fall approaches, as does the general election. Given the division within the country, the stoking of alarm, no doubt many feel that we are on a slippery slope. No one can know what the future will be. Our insecurity prompts us to seek what is base, dishonorable, – to be defensive minded. I think…
Nothing is wasted! Even a heritage that one has taken measure of, reflected upon, then with effort to transition, to construct a more humane self, – that old wreckage in the rear-view-mirror is a resource for insight. Nietzsche states that holiness is nothing but a quest for purity. Saintliness is to insist upon unifying…
How do I begin? We are several days on the far side of Labor Day. In this election year, November 4th is coming up fast (like a sweeping curve at the end of a racetrack straightaway). We, that is fellow citizens, will soon cast a ballot to select the 47th president of the United…
This is one of the most un-nerving texts I’ve ever read. A single idea that I have held sacred for a long time as an adult is the thought that I and others, say everyone in this room could, might thrive in a loving relationship. A tagline from the great song by the Eagles…
Human individuals are often surprising. Each of us is the consequence of genetic inheritance, and of conditioning. What I mean to say by conditioning – that complex of geography, of the point in time of a civilization’s/people’s stage of development, of the style and degree of nurture received from one’s parents, of the texture…
These lines are counter intuitive to the contemporary American scale of values. Democracy valorizes what is common, the equality of citizenship. I think this is a critical dimension, to be defended – at the level of political participation in our society. By universal agreement every citizen has a voice, in the form of a…
