But then, on a Sunday morning, in an otherwise inconsequential corner of our world, there is a quarter second of silence, wrapped up in the final moments of music and bells. It is a quarter second to dream, to think- to refocus. It is a quarter second that, notated mathematically looks like ‘.25 second’ or '1/4 second', or the ‘one’ in ‘oneMississippi’. It seems like a short period, but our human hearts and minds can seemingly fill days of space in that little bit of time.
To Raise a Voice
This is the arts. This is lifeblood. To sing together, to make sounds with many as one, to move, to emote, these are the very base of who we are as humans. It is local. It is personal. Yet, in too many schools in too many communities, these have been taken away for expedience and cost savings.
Our Nation’s Very Own Excitable Boy (with apologies to Warren Zevon)
I’m tired of this. For the last 8 years we have had sycophants around our nation apologizing for an incorrigible, spoiled, preschooler, wearing a poorly kept up 77 year old body.
If this were a movie…
In summary, the Senate is trying to fix the Southern Border, while a Republican presidential candidate is pushing insurrection buddies in Congress to stop Senate plans, while the House of Representatives will reject any border security bill because they don't want the President to look good in an election year, while they are busy trying to make the President look bad by trying to impeach him and the Secretary of Homeland Security for not doing anything for border security.
Ancestors
We are sitting in the midst of the 2023 holiday season, with a just completed Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus, our ‘Prince of Peace’. These should be days of joy and contemplation. Instead, we are distracted by the words of an insurrectionist, spouting forth filth drawn from words of an evil man who our nation fought against nearly a century ago, to protect and to save freedom. They are words that are contradictory to the sentiment of what America is and should be. They are words contradictory to the core belief of many of the Insurrectionist’s followers, who espouse patriotism, even as they spout The Insurrectionist’s idiot words.
Pearl Harbor Day?
These were the Greatest Generation. They were a generation who, after victoriously returning home, put that heroism aside, held their children, loved their spouses, and built the United States into a world leader. Today the items that were leading my newsfeed were a former president vowing that he would only be a dictator for one day, and four presidential candidates arguing over who could be most cruel to those who don’t meet a narrow version of what a true American should be.
“Happy Presidents’ Day to you, sir”
That day represents a true symbolic testament to the fruits of a quadrennial tradition of voting to either give the leader four more years, or to move on with a new leader. No guns. No violence. No take-backs. The people speak. The Nation moves on.
Our Ratchet Society
Where the goat has an advantage over a person is in the baggage introduced. Goats take their confrontations at face value and settle those confrontations with force of body against body. There can be lethality from the horn, but, again, that is not the goal of the confrontation. We humans on the other hand, well, we go into a confrontation thinking that we know more than we do before we even try to work things out. Our twenty first century information society easily divides us into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, with all the inherent early threat warnings that go along with that.
Hot Potato
In the months and years to follow, our political leadership will dissect the happenings that got us out of Afghanistan. Books will be written, and documentaries made that will pore over the minutia that brought us to where we are. There will be political planks built on "never again" and "U.S. military honor". Hidden policy will become public outrage. The public will sway to the political winds of the moment, and we will shake our collective heads in horror as truths begin to come out of, hopefully, not just about how we got out of Afghanistan, but also how we got into Afghanistan.
A Run from our Past
It is much harder to be patriotic while understanding that we are a Nation with a patchwork, complex history, that has not always lived up to its founding principles. It is a much harder soundbite to make when one has to take the time to understand that our blank white page is stained with hypocrisy, greed, cheating, and double-dealing.
Wicked Words for Hope and Salvation 