On Wednesday, April 2, 2014, the Supreme Court issued its decision on the McCutcheon case, in which Alabama businessman Shaun McCutcheon and the Republican National Committee claimed that the Federal Election Campaign Act restricted his freedom of speech. In a 5-to-4 decision, the Court agreed that limitation of political spending limits personal speech. Continue reading
Almost every individual person is educable. I’ll define educable as being capable of learning from the mistakes of others. Likewise, almost every individual is corrigible. Corrigible means capable of learning from one’s own mistakes. Institutions, like individuals, are educable. Continue reading
Last week, I reviewed Julian Barnes’ story of an aging, retired man named Tony Webster. Webster lives alone, remembers regrettable events of his youth, suffers remorse when he encounters the living and ghostly persons of his past, and still does not find a way to heal the hurts or to generate meaning in his life. Perhaps, as his former girlfriend says, he “just doesn’t get it.”
Does today’s youth-oriented culture—a functioning system—regard older people as irrelevant, as those who no longer “get it?” Continue reading
This existential novella presents two parts of a life story and an unspoken questioning of life itself. Continue reading
We all live by principles—at least, most of us think we do. Principles are not necessarily lofty. Continue reading
Of all the newsletters that cross my desk, the one that tugs my heart comes from the Friends of the San Luis Valley National Wildlife Refuges. That heart-tug pulls back to my youth there, hunting rabbits and ducks on that land when it was wetlands and grassland, long before it was a nearly-dry refuge pumping groundwater to maintain some of its habitat. Continue reading
Arguments over whether climate change is real, and if so whether it is man-caused, ignore the elephant in the room. Continue reading
Of the economically developed countries of the world, the U.S. has the most dysfunctional society—that is, we have depression despite material goods, materialism without community, more teen and single parents, less trust, more impoverishment, higher infant mortality, more drugs, obesity, school bullying and school shootings. Continue reading