When I was a child, I spent a lot of time feeling guilty for what I had that other people did not, and wondering about my responsibility for addressing the problems of others and of the planet. During high school, I volunteered at a homeless shelter. I was obsessive about not littering, turning off the…
Do you want to know the truth? Or do you want your truth accepted by others? Are you seeking, or are you asserting? Are you speaking, always working The angle, searching for the advantage? You wear your certainty like a badge of honor, But pretending you understand what you do not Will not prove your…
When you tell me something works, I ask, "Who for, by what measures, and at what cost?" Stock buy-backs, smelting furnaces, corporate bailouts, and CAFOs work for some of us but not the sum of us. If your bargain saves me a dollar on a pork chop but costs me my soul, was it worth…
In our culture, we venerate power. Perhaps many cultures do, but ours seems particularly fascinated with it. When we see a problem, we tend to approach it through domination. We place international struggles in the frame of military conflict. We immediately handle social problems like crime through increases in policing. Parenting is viewed through the…
I can’t imagine my own child living far from home, forced to work to provide for their own living or to send money back to us so that we can survive. Packaging chips, baking granola bars, cutting meat, doing whatever is required by the adults who are their guardians, whether in their best interest or…
“Back the Blue.” “All Cops Are Bastards.” Both of these slogans generalize a particular conclusion about police. Either we reflexively defend or attack all individual police officers. I can’t agree with statements that define everyone in a particular group as the same. Police officers make mistakes. They break the law. They are honorable. They care…
The movement of the second hand on the clock heightens my sense that time is a scarce resource. I often feel like I am running out of time, like I am competing against the clock. One of my highest enacted values is accomplishing a task in the shortest amount of time, or accomplishing more things…
I have struggled with a fear of death since I was a child. When I was about 13 years old, I went through a period where death was my first thought when I woke up each morning. I know that fearing death is natural and as close to a universal human experience as exists, but…
Members of the College Board: We received your recent application to import your Advanced Placement African American Studies class into the great state of Florida. We appreciate your desire to spread your woke ideologies throughout the country, and especially to bring them to God-fearing Floridians. However, those Floridians of the white race are constitutionally unable…
An early January day in Chicago, filled with warm sunshine. A day in February, with flower shoots poking through the soil. Mid-March and the tree buds are breaking open. The markers of a typical year, transposed in time, signs of a disrupted rhythm. Weather is not climate and history is not destiny, but this sits…
I usually resist the push for New Year’s resolutions because it feels to me like a contrived focus on personal change. Why does January 1st need to be the point when we change our behavior? Why would we be more successful at this time of year than at any other? So I usually don’t make…
Entwining 