The Unclad Soul

In general, but not in particular, because there are many opposite examples, but generally speaking, we are a nation of lazy, greedy citizens. Our laziness resides in the fact that we continue, year after drubbing year, to tolerate a Congress that is 98% corrupt and in the pockets of huge corporations, including Wall Street banks and the giant tech companies, not to mention the entire network of media communications. Our indifference to the blathering incompetence and the arrogant disregard of representative government by so many senators and House members in both parties is staggering. That we as a people allow this says something alarming about our character. Leo Tolstoy, the brilliant Russian novelist, once wrote in one of his many essays, “ If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”...

The human catastrophe in Yemen is entirely man made. The politics of it are messy and complicated and the various factions behind this horror, the U.S. among them, are difficult to keep up with. But the bottom line is this: government leaders started the war there, they have continued it, and they are doing precious little to avoid civilian casualties and deaths, and, they are impeding the flow of medical care and food for the millions of suffering people there. Cholera is now an epidemic in the country and thousands of displaced families and individuals are dying from a disease that afflicts the most primitive environments of refuse, squalor, and starvation. According to a report on NPR this morning some families have lived in cardboard tents for three years, their children out of school for that time, and endless neighborhoods of people without food or water or hope. For what? For greed. Power. Control. Here we are in the 21 st century and the world wobbles in the i...