• Personal Reflections - Politics/Culture

    Elie Weisel and Volodymyr Zelensky’s Unanswered Questions

    April 23, 2022 - By 

    “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” —Joseph Conrad *** Last week while reading through the latest reports of Russia’s continuing atrocities against Ukraine, I found myself suddenly bursting with indignation, yelling at my laptop as if I were 10 years old and made aware for the first time that the world can be a horrible place in which horrible things happen to undeserving people. Many nations of the world are ‘doing something.’ Many things, actually, costing many dollars. But a powerful and potentially world-altering question lurks under…

  • Personal Reflections - Politics/Culture

    What a Wondrous Time To Be Alive

    October 4, 2020 - By 

    So we lurch from crisis to crises, seeming to come in multiples now. Pandemics, hurricanes and fires. Protests erupting anew with each same-old same-old death-by-police of a black person. A mad king’s 98-minute prime time tantrum giving way to a shocking mid-of-night revelation, and before the sun descends again, a 5-minute helicopter lift straight to a fabled army hospital’s “presidential suite.” Things falling apart, the center (was there ever a center?) no longer holding, dark possibilities going darker with the coming winter and its portents of an ever greater discontent. We gasp at the news, the world going freeze-dried, suspended,…

  • A Meditation on Hope
    Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    A Meditation on Hope

    November 23, 2014 - By 

    My newest crusade is to have the cleanest, most litter-free potter’s field in the world sprawled in front of me on my morning walks through the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery, not one candy wrapper, cigarette butt or beer bottle surviving the sweep of my gaze as I traverse its hills and dales. My eyes are mine sweepers, extending 180 degrees through the harbor, left, right, back, up and forth. My mission: to find and emerge triumphant over every litter bomb, no matter how tiny it is or clever its attempts to hide behind a bush or under mounds of dead…