…this sluggish paradise. A human being protected from all normal and natural hardship simply is not alive. We inhabit insecurely a world which must of its intransitory nature be insecure. The tyranny of mindless technology. It is well to use the wheel. But it is fatal to be bound to it. We are trapped…
THE DIAGNOSIS This generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime and can’t bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers. An increasing number of Americans agree that…
The primal law that governs all living: not love not hate not hope but fear Its universality is the cause of every abomination in the shitty chaos called human history. The trick is not to become unbalanced, punished, ruled by it. Any fool can be a pessimist; it takes no imagination, no guts. Remember…
When you cut off arterial blood to an organ, the organ dies. When you cut the flow of nature into people’s lives, their spirit dies. As we plunge into cyberspace and strive to replicate the “real” world in the “virtual,” we lose sight of one fundamental fact: nature is totally missing in the digital…
We have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time— when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest…
Good Friday, two days before Easter Sunday is the day of commemoration of Jesus’s death. There are various of interpretations of Jesus’s death by Christians. The essential idea is that Jesus was a substitute, he died as a stand-in for everyone else. The word sacrifice is typically used. The ancient religious understanding of sacrifice…
Another day in paradise. I say paradise ironically. We live East of Eden, outside the gates of paradise. Or to put it another way with a lyric line from Hotel California, “This could be heaven or this could be hell…” I heard about the cruise missile strike on the Syrian airbase. Shortly afterward I…
I’m in a funk this morning. The ACA, also known as Obamacare is certain to be repealed and replaced today. The replacement will be something unaccountably cruel. The accounting will come soon enough, when the fixed sum of money allocated to the states runs out. At the same time, there is no cap on…
I can hardly write this morning. Like a massive rotating hurricane, —gale force words on immigration surround the eye of this storm. Our newly elected president is the eye. The storm has yet to make landfall. It promises to be a big one, like the one that ripped up New Orleans a few years…
Tuesday morning, gray sky, warm and a light rain is falling. Feels like May in late February. Wish that I knew what this radical momentary departure from winter means. Perhaps it means nothing, portends nothing that is to come. After all, it’s weather and weather is change on a daily basis, forgettable. Or maybe…
