Yesterday we visited Cantigny Park to experience a Revolutionary War Reenactment. At a distance we observed the ballet like performance of a artillery crew firing the canon, then followed the choreographed advance of a line of infantry marching across the green meadow. Reenact a war? The thought of reenacting a war, causes the mind…
Today violence is the rhetoric of the period, the empty rhetorician has made it his own. When a reality of human existence has completed its historic course, has been shipwrecked and lies dead, the waves throw it up on the shores of rhetoric, where the corpse remains for a long time. Rhetoric is the…
In a right ordering of public affairs, the mass is that part which does not act of itself. Such is its mission. It has come into the world to be directed, influenced, represented, organized … It needs to submit its life to a higher court, formed of the superior minorities. …but without them, humanity…
Memory, is what we call the minds re-membering of past experience, of what we did, saw or heard. Memory is not an exact replication of a past event. Memory like everything else the mind/body does, serves the survival of the organism. I will always remember the announcement of yesterday, the Supreme Court ruling eliminating…
It’s difficult to “move on” from the drama of Memorial Day. Though a day of remembrance, certainly the fact of war is impossible to dismiss as the fighting, the random death of the battle for Dombas furiously unfolds in Ukraine. I shudder, my imagination cannot trace the paralyzing terror which the Ukrainian soldiers and…
I write in the morning, seated at Starbucks, enveloped in the buzz of townspeople conversing around me. Most linger here for as long as it takes the barista to fill their drink order. Some like myself stay for a while. I recognize many and know some, the regulars. At the corner of State…
We Americans are “stuck in a ditch”, “out of gas”, “can’t find the keys.” Use any metaphor that comes to mind to describe an impasse. The automobile, “the invention” of the 20th century, is the indispensable means of transportation. How many idioms do we have to express the helpless feeling of being unable to…
It is Monday morning. I am in a hotel room in Springfield Missouri. Unaccountably I slept well last night. There is much to subvert a good night’s sleep, the bits and pieces of “the news” that one would rather not think about. Often the knowledge of things I would rather not say out loud,…
That Madman Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!” As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have…
It is Thursday. A morning sun shines in brilliance. Nature is awakens ! I can feel it. If you are a church-going person, today would be Maundy Thursday, a commemoration of the “last supper.” Perhaps you remember the painting by Leonardo da Vinci? How ironic that an aspect of that final week, was a…
