“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 audio version click here We are always surprised when they appear. Made disquieted by the times, we may sense their approach, but their terrible acts still shock us. How could this happen here? What makes them? Sometimes they walk out of that part of the American landscape made toxic and lethal by cratered hopes and ideological madness, or by racial or ethnic hatred. Some possess storm-ridden minds beset by visions of immortality, troubled by voices […]
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For audio version click here Martin Luther King Jr. threw himself out of his upstairs bedroom window because he thought his younger brother had killed his grandmother when he flew into her while riding the staircase bannister.* He was five years old. He refused to rise until he had been assured and reassured that she was alive. He repeated this when he was twelve when she died of a heart attack. In light of what he […]
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For audio version click here Standing chest deep in the Atlantic, barn door skates gliding through our group, we told stories. Ben, the Coast Guard veteran, spoke of seeing the North Atlantic in 20 foot waves . Wearing his neoprene survival suit and winter gear, he would brace himself on top of the bridge, binoculars up, feeling the descent into the trough of the wave and then look up at 40 feet of wave above him before the cutter rose and then crashed into it, tons of water […]
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For audio version click here On Sunday the water is an olive green, and the whitecaps advancing, one after another, at speed. It looks mean and dangerous. No one is splashing in that ocean. North and south, the surf is empty, and the wind, cold and constant. This does not feel like June. The lifeguards look like baby crows in the storm, perched high in their chair right next to each other, swaddled in dark sweatpants and hoodies. […]
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