“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 have been searching out the mystery of my mother and father for over a decade. Let me say it melodramatically – I have been reaching out to touch ghosts, and in traveling to Donaldson PA, my father’s ghost. In 1941 as a 24-year-old Pennsylvania State Trooper, he was the first officer present at a confrontation between several thousand ‘ bootleg ’ miners and their wives and children and a coterie […]
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I wrenched down a swinging 20-foot limb from our dead maple yesterday, a heavy beast which crashed and splintered and drove two branches a foot into the ground, and then I broke it apart with an ax that I sharpened and resharpened, and I hoisted its pieces and hauled them to a brush pile. Every day I’m trying to match the body to the mind. Read, write, bend, lift, walk, […]
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I’m optimistic about the near future even though I’m about to tell you that I do not think we will escape the present MAGA degeneracy without a cataclysm. But first, Abraham Lincoln*. Prior to his election, political and religious figures all over the South not only railed against him, but also spoke in the most vehement terms about the moral goodness of slavery. He was elected with less than 40% […]
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We came down from the high country in Utah, out of Provo Canyon and onto Route 189, and the land began to spread out, and we saw again how vast the space, how empty, with towns sprawling out without any sense of verticality, and new developments tightly packed together seeming like outposts rather than suburbs of Salt Lake. The landscape dwarfs human habitations. When the snow comes churning through, and […]
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