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…
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…
The college football season begins. Following an afternoon of immersion in drag racing at Great Lakes Drag-a-way in Wisconsin, I resigned myself to indifferently watching the game between Texas A&M and Notre Dame on channel 7. The commentators ballyhoo’d the start of the season, which features televised games in state-of-the-art stadiums viewed by millions,…
These are severe, almost serrated words. The writer observes how profoundly we are marked, shaped by attitudes, habitual behaviors of our immediate, even of ancestors not proximate to our memory. I hardly knew my grandfather. Nevertheless what he loved lives and and is expressed in me. This endowment, a tendency for benefit or for…
