“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
I taught any number of young men and women who volunteered for the Armed Forces upon graduating – as far as I can remember, they covered every branch: Navy, Coast Guard, Army, Air Force and the Marines, but more Marines than any other branch. For 18-year old’s, I suspect that the romance of that Service is compelling. Many came back to talk with me after Boot Camp, after deployments, after […]
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Once upon a time the story goes, and from there the laws of the normal world change – magic replaces what is real, and sometimes power falls into the grasp of a sorcerer, and the land falls under a spell. Sorcerers possess the gift of shapeshifting. They have confidence in their ability to use their magic to evade disaster or to turn their corruption into gold. I’ve begun to think […]
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Well before January 6, Trumpists had called for a Civil War and for a kind of generalized threat of violence against Democrats, school board members, librarians, election officials … well, against anyone who publicly opposed them or possessed a rational mind and a conscience. On January 6 they exercised that violence for the first time as a mob in their assault on Congress. Since the search of Mar-a-Lago, those threats have escalated against judges, […]
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I am mourning Bill Russell, a man who helped break my teenage heart when basketball was often the center of my world, the player who, more than any other Boston Celtic, was the executioner of The Philadelphia 76er’s, my team. I am mourning him because I was probably secretly in love with him (and John Havlicek), a secret I had to keep to myself when the Sixers’ Wilt Chamberlain was […]
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