“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
For a very long time, for decades really, but especially since 2016, I’ve been trying to figure out how ordinary people united by a cause or by a point-of-view, can arrive at a point where they can believe absurdities and do terrible things. So let me begin with a story about a conspiracy and about the power of belief in changing a mind. Sometime in the summer of 1969, my […]
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Every Saturday before Services, private security arrives to take their places at the doors, and a police car sits, conspicuously, close by. After Tree of Life , after Colleyville , after Charlottesville , after countless MAGA attacks on George Soro s and the dog whistle references to ‘ cosmopolitan elites ’, after Trump’s attacks on American Jews , after tranches of threats, after who knows how many individual attacks , this is how the congregants’ worship at a friend’s synagogue. Anti-Semitism, always an undercurrent in American life, has […]
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Before my father’s death, I sat with him and asked questions about his time in the Pennsylvania State Police, specifically where he had been posted and how long he had spent in each Barracks. He graduated from training in April of 1938 from an old Albright College campus in Myerstown. The building is still there. It is now the home of an evangelical seminary. The graduation ceremony took place in Harrisburg. So many troopers […]
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I spend many mornings holding binoculars to my eyes and watching birds come into feed. I keep a daily list: juncos flitting like little groundling bats in the early dim light. goldfinches, male cardinals popping that red especially on gray mornings, nuthatches chitting continuously, purple finches, jays tucking their wings against their bodies and diving straight down from their perches in the dead maple like arrows blurring blue-white, one […]
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