Circles Of Conflict
Is it not the case that similar problems, analogous issues present themselves over and over, such as is suggested by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay, Circles? Emerson wrote in his unforgettable way that life is composed of concentric circles, intersecting matters of concern, of compelling interest. Fresh to my consciousness is an email…
Enjoy The Revolution
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…
Our Home For The Aged
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…
On Lynching
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…
To Sacrifice Half The Population
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…
Memorial Day Redux
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…
Not To Stand, Not To Kneel
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…
Losing The Keys
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…
Ghostly, Whiter Shade Of Pale
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,…
