But…what if we can’t keep it?  What if our Republic is destroyed?   Do we have a Plan B? It never seriously occurred to me that perhaps we couldn’t keep it.  I was only four years old when I read “Ben and Me”, a charming little biography of Benjamin Franklin for children, ostensibly written by his pet mouse Amos.  Ever since, I have carried with me Franklin’s famous statement naming the new form of government the Founders had created—a Republic—and his warning of its vulnerab

Most of us who messed up when we were teenagers didn’t wind up in prison.  Instead, we went on to   learn how to make a living, prepare for a career, make connections, find a job, be coached by a mentor, balance risks and rewards, maybe fall in love and create a stable family life among supportive friends and neighbors. But those who did become incarcerated spent months or years going nowhere.  They spent soul-crushing days at menial, repetitive, distasteful tasks with maybe

Call me crazy, call me naïve.  But why not hope that bad news could trigger a good result?   A staggering 42,000,000 Americans struggle to put food on the table every day. So in more civil days, we rallied with a safety net.  SNAP and other support programs were put in place during times when care for our suffering neighbors seemed normal.  But these merciful provisions—and even their emergency backups—are being sabotaged by ruthless members of an administration hostile to c

Just yesterday, I shared my thoughts about the danger to "truth" and "reality" caused by the ubiquitous and growing use of plausible misinformation and AI-generated images and videos almost impossible to detect as bogus. And now today the New York Times does a deep-dive into the myriad ways Trump is using these tools nonstop to create a world in which whatever he says carries inordinate apparent authority. I urge you to read this amazing account from the NYT below to see ju

“Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” If you were a kid back when I was a kid—the thirties, forties, fifties—you heard that advice often from your elders.  They knew that life was routinely corrupted by those with an axe to grind and the means to spread misinformation.  It’s been going on since mass media emerged.  Newspapers were respected and persuasive just by dint of being published, even when the publishers were trying to start a war or ruin a p

I am going to be switching my blog platform to Substack, to provide you a much simpler way to offer your "Comments" at the end of my...

I have been dumbfounded since Trump’s re-election.  (Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “lacking the power of human speech”)  For an erstwhile writer, this is profoundly dismaying.  But I have literally been unable to conjure any words or images that could grasp and express how I experience this unprecedented calamity that has befallen us all.  And with each additional stupefying blow to all that we hold holy, my incapacity to speak about how I feel only deepened. Until yesterday. 

Far from my usual blog offerings, this post is painfully personal and yet full of wonder. I offer it as a sign of hope amidst the...

My father was a careful man.  An architect.  A woodworker.  A builder. And a fount of axioms.  Given his passions, one favorite was...

My seminary classmate Don awoke one morning to discover that the left half of his body was numb.  He could barely move his limbs, and so...