“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
“Each new morn new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows strike heaven on the face …,”* and no one seems to pay for them. This is what the world feels like right now. Justice needs clear resolutions. It needs moral compensation. It requires the awful nature of terrible, purposeful choices to be described and the perpetrators held to account, to pay the cost of the suffering they have created. […]
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I’m trying to take a breath. I’m trying to snatch some semblance of calm from the ten thousand stories that tell of the imminent end of so much that sane human beings love. I cannot bring myself to write the list because I would feel compelled to leave nothing out and that would strangle this moment. We left a bare 50-foot maple in our yard. It died about 18 months […]
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I remember an America before it went nuts. This is not an old white man’s nostalgia for a ‘blah blah sonny when I was a boy in simpler times’ semi-dementia warbling. That America was a mess and lots of the signs were flashing red about the culture wars, guns, environmental destruction, our love of mindless spectacle and our eroding ability to focus on complexity, but pre-Columbine, pre-9/11, pre-Iraq War, and […]
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Each Saturday the little boy and his father come in for hot chocolate and a cookie. We speak to each other through drawings. “What shall we talk about today?” I write. He thinks, holds the pen up to his mouth, lips pursed. “Mountains,” he prints. What makes mountains?” I ask. It takes me a moment. I’m deciphering the word he scrawled. “Love?” No. “Lava.” His father laughs and says, “I think […]
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