Isolated minds. Dead hearts.
We have reached the point in our civic lives where we are easily overwhelmed by evil and hatred, which isolate the mind and kill the heart.
All posts filed under: Monday Musings
Have the courage to defy convention
The comment that “my father did the ironing and my mother did the finances” led down a new path.
We have to own up to our culture if we want to change it
Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be An Antiracist” is a powerful reminder of our personal responsibilities in fighting racism.
Let’s dream again
Moving towards a place and time where belief in our abilities to achieve a noble common purpose defeats the fears that turn hate into loathing.
Democracy is never permanent…and the work to keep it never ends
My series of observations on the lessons of history in the fight for democracy.
Be a good boy…and follow your mother’s advice
The story of the ratification of the 19th amendment – giving women the right to vote – has connections to Tennessee and a historic hotel in Nashville.
History tells us democracy is the objective
The only surprising thing about Mike Lee’s statement saying democracy isn’t the objective is that he said the quiet part out loud.
Let’s stop celebrating a past that never existed. Instead, let’s understand and honor the one that did.
I first stood at Jamestown as a history-enthralled 11-year-old. The picture of the 17th century ruin of the church tower, abutted to the 1907 Memorial Church, is seared in my mind. I also remember the water lapping at the nearby shore, serving as a reminder that the people at Jamestown had the most tenuous of toeholds on this continent in those early years. While I didn’t know it at the time, the narratives of life in early 17th century Virginia — told by the guides, the plaques that lined the walls of the 1907 church, and the books I devoured — were incomplete and sometimes egregiously false. White Christian Europeans were the focus. If they were mentioned at all, Native Americans, along with the enslaved African Americans who began arriving against their will at Jamestown in 1619, were small, dependent actors; impediments, if you will, to the greater story of the colonists and settlers and the shaping of what it meant to be an “American.” Those Europeans were not home. They were the outsiders. Yet …
UPDATED: How can I miss you if you won’t go away?
My “egg on my face” update concerning Joe Biden’s fitness for office.
Defining our democracy
“The good things in our nation did not come about by chance, and they will not be preserved by indifference.” The Rev. Dr. Deborah Meister I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Keeping a democracy takes work. Disuse of democracy by a careless majority is cause enough for worry in a world of constant struggle between tyranny and freedom. But when that indifference is coupled with a deliberate effort by a wealthy minority to undermine the public good for private gain, we find ourselves at a point where Americans are in danger of having government by the people smothered by an oligarchy focused on the enrichment of the few and the repression of those who disagree with them. America as an idea is a work in progress, with an eye on the prospects for the future. At our best, we are always growing, always becoming, as we move toward that more perfect union. But we are not always at our best. The history that really happened, as opposed to the history we’ve told …
MORE TO COME... 