The Unclad Soul

I spent last evening watching on C-Span the House Oversight Committee eviscerate the former commissioner of the IRS, Douglas Shulman. Both Republicans and Democrats took turns sanctimoniously judging Shulman and trying with all the drama of a courtroom trial of some grotesque murderer to humiliate and destroy the man. The Republicans of course love this kind of stuff.  Their questioning bordered on hysteria and orgasmic delight.  Most of it was complete buffoonery; as usual.  And the Democrats, who never miss a chance to hold hands with Republican fanatics and support them in their derangement, joined right in.  They always do this if they think doing so will impress someone out there in the voting public who thinks Democrats are passive sissies.  But of course no one is ever impressed by this display of phony outrage. Having a brain and being an intelligent, rational presence seems lost on all of those on this committee.  With the exception o...

I have a great need to experience the sacred.  I think we all do. We live in times that so often desecrate the human spirit.  War, drones, gun violence, road rage, political wrangling, insatiable greed, sexual abuse, child abandonment, and all sorts of inhuman acts against one another too often occur which all serve to deaden our souls. The recent news of the man who systematically kidnapped three young girls in his neighborhood, who just decided to own them as his property, held them captive for years, sexually used them for his own entertainment, was unimaginable in its heartlessness.  How do those women, whose youth and teenage years and sense of self were taken from them, how do they recover from that kind of fiendish, barbaric treatment?  We see this on the news and something dies inside us.  It is so easy then to want to harden ourselves against the cruelty of others.  But in the process we lose our connection with the sacred. Each m...