Sometime in the early 1980’s, it occurred to me that the country was making a major divergence from its longstanding commitment to the idea that government had a responsibility to aid those on the lowest rungs of the social and economic ladder. I suppose that vague uneasiness with the nascent Reagan Revolution and the...
This is the concluding section on an earier entry about the misuse and abuse of the word “liberal,” both in upper-case and lower-case usage. I will be accused of being a Pollyanna here, but wouldn’t it be nice if we, everybody, could stop using simplistic name tags? Just for the sake of discussion, let’s...
How did “liberal” get to be a dirty word? I know that seems to contradict the headline, but it frosts my grommet that the popular usage of an important word gets twisted around to mean something almost diametrically different than what the dictionary says. A word that Merriam Webster and I agree denotes a...
I’ll try to put this as succinctly as I can: we went to war in Afghanistan out of an understandable desire to bring to justice the mastermind of the attacks on 9/11, and we’ve stayed there for another decade – and counting – because of a logically defensible proposition that to abandon that accursed...
I’ve been a big movie buff for as long as I can remember, dating back even to the 1950’s as I watched grainy, black-and-white classics from the postwar era. At 7 or 8 years old, my appreciation and understanding was limited perhaps, but there was something about the story telling and the magic of...
One supposes that the great challenge of daily life is to stay connected to those things that matter the most despite the nearly overwhelming temptation to turn away when the frustration level seems too great and the cost of trying to change something for the better seems impossible. That would seem like a fairly...