The words below have been spoken, part of the historical record, and they speak powerfully for their respective viewpoints. So I will leave very few words here myself. I was going back and forth about the order I should put these video clips in, but a bit of reflection was all I needed to understand who and what must be slotted in as the last word. May the goodness, kindness, compassion, mercy, forgiveness and love associated with the gods of every religion, of the life force and the best of the human heart, prevail in this struggle to lay claim…
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Here are the first two sentences of Charles Van Doren’s biography in Wikipedia: Charles Lincoln Van Doren (February 12, 1926 – April 9, 2019), was an American writer and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s. In 1959 he testified before the United States Congress that he had been given the correct answers by the producers of the NBC quiz show Twenty-One. After the third sentence describing his subsequent career as a writer of multiple books and an editor for the “Encyclopedia Britannica,” the fourth sentence under the heading of Background reads: Charles Van Doren was born in New York City, the…
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Like so many moms everywhere, mine loomed huge in my formative years, so much so that when I think back to my childhood it’s difficult to separate much of it, much of myself, from her presence. Which is not to imply that she was forceful or dominant—far from it. Mom, born on this day exactly one century ago in Budapest, Hungary as Zsuzsanna (Susan) Marie Lučić (pronounced “lou-cheech”), was the gentlest of souls. If I could encapsulate the feeling tone of that “presence” I refer to above, what most suggests itself to me is the currently fashionable phrase that she…
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If it took God six days to create the heavens and the earth before taking a rest day as the “Book of Genesis” tells us, we can be certain that by the dawn of that seventh day, storytellers of every stripe were already hard at work conjuring tales of the destruction of Earth and all its creatures. That theme of apocalypse—“The end times are here!”—has persisted ever since, seemingly built into the fabric of existence as surely as night was designed to follow day, or for the terror of the underworld to serve as the counterweight to the beauty of…