The Unclad Soul

A fundamental truth in the teachings of Jesus was that the wicked are not as dangerous as those who pretend to be righteous. In fact, the only group that Jesus ever publically rebuked, and he did it more than once, was the Pharisees. Their self-righteousness and religious intolerance of anyone breaking their rules angered Jesus because he saw it as a mockery of the love God had sent him to live and share. The recent vote at the global United Methodist Church conference, which affirmed and tightened its ban on same-sex marriage and gay and lesbian clergy, is, in my opinion, a sad continuation of the Pharisees of old who used their faith to exclude and judge others. Let’s not forget that Roman emperor Constantine, who converted to Christianity and hailed himself as bringing it to Rome, was a more than compromised leader. He had his own son killed and boiled his wife in hot water. And yet he remains in history an icon of Christianity. The Crusades, which lasted 200 years,...

The news photo of a defenseless 92-year old Mexican man who was recently beaten with a brick by a woman and kicked by men, haunts and torments me. The woman, whose toddler daughter watched the whole thing, told the bleeding and battered old man to “Go back to Mexico.” He was visiting his family and was simply taking a walk near the house when the woman assaulted him. 92 years old. I watched a lengthy video on Facebook last week by a young Latina woman at a Chicago park who was verbally taunted by a drunk white man who kept getting in her face while a white police officer stood by and watched, doing nothing, even though she kept asking the officer to intervene. She and her family had rented a space at the park for a birthday party. But the drunk man and another white man were sitting in their space and wouldn’t leave. He then began harassing her because she was wearing a shirt that read, Puerto Rico on it. Eventually, several other police officers arrived but they let the drunk man ...

The uproar over Roseanne Barr’s ugly comment about Valerie Jarrett is getting the attention it deserves. I’m only a small shell on a giant seashore but let me say I applaud ABC for their courageous decision to cancel Roseanne’s show. It takes true integrity to put a successful company’s core values over a TV series that was producing multimillions of dollars of advertising. Whatever other motives the network may have had, they certainly proved they were willing to lose a highly profitable show in order to stand on the side of common decency and intolerance of racist comments from one of their most popular stars. Let’s look at it once again. Roseanne Barr, responding to a comment about President Obama’s former advisor, Valerie Jarrett, tweeted: “muslim brotherhood and planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” If you can find a way to defend that statement, I’m afraid you have crossed the boundaries of rational thought. Just a joke, you say? Everyone does it? Others have said worse...

There is this from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” (There is a long pause.) “Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again. “No, I give up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?” “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter . And so, there you have it. My dilemma. I’m trying to figure out what happened to us as a nation. It’s a riddle I can’t answer. I haven’t the slightest idea. There are possible answers, I suppose. We got too big. We overachieved. We mixed religion with politics and politics took over religion. We became insanely selfish. We forgot our neighbors. We learned to hate more than we learned to love. We confined ourselves to our own kind and decided “others” were our enemies. We stopped thinking. We stopped caring. We stopped growing. The list is pretty much endless. So here we are. A nation in crisis. We’re surrounded by the greatest gadgets and devices and pla...

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 election in Alabama yesterday to replace Senate Republican Jeff Sessions ended another high profile, tawdry political race, one that reminds us of how far our political system has fallen into disgrace. Roy Moore, a controversial evangelical firebrand, a man who had twice been removed from office as an Alabama Supreme Court justice, for blatantly ignoring federal laws, and who reportedly was banned from a mall for spooking teenage girls, and who was accused by various adult women of having made inappropriate advances toward them when they were teens, centered his campaign, unbelievably, on Christian principles. Moore made a career of using religion to bolster the support of Christians for his political ambitions. And for years it worked. But apparently many voters got tired of the hypocrisy and the manipulation and rejected him. Including a large number of Black voters who courageously stood up to Moore’s shoddy politics that were often prejudicial and intolerant of minorit...

If I could, I would Stop all the wars And heal all the sores And give the less more And free the bored And individualize the hoard If I could If I could, I would Have all women revered And all children loved And the old honored And the sick well And the disabled cheered And the foreigner welcomed If I could If I could, I would Enact gay rights around the world And celebrate them as whole And give them freedom To be who they are And embrace them into The family of you and me If I could If I could, I would Empty Congress of its politicians And fill it with teachers And Poets And writers; With artists And sculptors; With farmers And ranchers; With animal lovers And stargazers; With gardeners And fishermen If I could If I could, I would Remove all bigotry And prejudice of every kind And put the redneck and the whitey and the Confederate flagger and the bully cop and the crooked judge and the ...

The remarkable Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, once wrote, “This hasn’t been the age for the righteous and the decent.  I know what it means to beget monsters  And to recognize in them myself.”  It is an appropriate indictment of our own day and of our own selves. I keep telling myself that what we are experiencing in our country is just a phase, something we have gone through before, where people who turn loathsome and violent, enormously greedy and arrogant, will change. That these dark clouds of hostility hovering over us will pass and the sunlight of decent behavior will shine again. But there is something alarmingly stubborn about the indignity, prejudice, violence, division and hatred among us. We seem stuck in a continuous atmosphere of rancor and bitter estrangement. And it is disturbing and frightening that our leaders seem incapable or not interested in changing the nation’s oppressive mood. Our media, in all of its forms, is clearly geared t...

I visited with my brother Jim yesterday and, as always when I see him, I left deeply reflecting on life. “The world,” Helen Keller once said, “is full of suffering; but also, the overcoming of it.” It is difficult to watch the news and see the horror in the Middle East. There is so much suffering and death there. And yet, people somehow survive it. Refugees walk hundreds of miles, pile their families and a few belongings into small boats to cross treacherous waters in hope of finding safety. They enter strange countries where now they are often unwelcome, mistreated, harmed or sent back to the nightmare they fled. How do they do it? How do they go on? The human spirit, though fragile, often shocks us with its undeterred courage. And here, in our country, minorities still struggle to be free. Free of discrimination, injustice, abuse, and hate. That our black friends still, after all these years, have to fight for basic rights is a stain on our democracy. Yet, they carry on,...

The recent presidential election has left people stunned and many frightened and worried. I have friends telling me how alarmed they are and wondering what is going to happen to all of us. Especially, what will happen to women, to immigrants, to minorities? What will the Supreme Court turn into? And what damage will an unbalanced Court in favor of extreme Republicans do to women’s rights, to the LGBT community, to freedom of speech and other Constitutional rights? Will the police turn even more brutal, completely unleashed to commit crimes against the innocent, without any restraints or punishment? People are angry, panicky, despondent. I think of Hamlet’s gloomy speech where he despairs of earth and people and life: “This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent cong...

I am making my way through the AMC Mad Men series. I saw the original series when it first came out almost ten years ago. Now I’m watching it again on Netflix. I knew what I was in for. Since the presidential election I have been trying to better understand myself, others, and my country. The ugly bitterness of the election left me emotionally exhausted, and frankly, disappointed in people in general. I didn’t follow the chaos on Twitter, but Facebook was a primeval jungle of crude squabbling, angry rants, malicious name calling, and endless acts of blocking and unfriending people. Some of them relatives and close friends. So after all of that, I decided to wander into Mad Men, the perfect setting for seeing the absolute worst in human hurt, pettiness, jealously, manipulation and betrayal. I thought that there, I might get some understanding of why, in certain circumstances, we sink, almost unconsciously and hopelessly, into such abysmal and damaging behavior. Don Draper, ...

Let it be said, by me, by all of us, that we will not sit silently by and watch our country be shredded by ignorance and cowardice, by hate and violence, by meanness and cruelty, or by discrimination, sexism, ageism, barbarity and intimidation. The election of Donald Trump is not now an invitation for all of us to be punks and jackasses and beasts. For those who think they will have in the White House someone who will defend indecency, bigotry, and lawlessness, be warned: you will be confronted and opposed. For those who think Trump as president is now your right to mock and piss on and shame, him and those who support him, get hold of yourselves. This is not a time for juvenile rants and petty retaliation. Respect for the Office of President, reverence for the Constitutional framework of our government, must be honored. If we play this game of seeing who can beat up the other, whether in words, photos, memes, or actual deeds of violence and cruelty, then we do not have a ...

I was sitting outside at a Taco spot downtown in the Farmer’s Market area having lunch. I could see the Dallas skyline just a few blocks from me in the background and I thought of the chaos in our city last week in the aftermath of the killing of five police officers by a deranged gunman at the end of a Black Lives Matter protest walk. He was not a part of that peaceful demonstration. But on this day the sun was shining and there was a nice breeze. All seemed quiet and normal. People were coming and going in the usual routines of the day. A small Farmer’s Market bus pulled into the parking lot and picked up a couple of riders. As it drove away I saw a slogan on the back of it that said something about the Market’s fine produce and foods and then, in big letters, there was this: “Cultivating Life.” That’s a lovely brand for a produce market and restaurant area. It would also be a terrific theme for all of Dallas or any great city. The work of a large urban metropolis should be ...

“There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity.”  ―   Bertrand Russell , Philosopher/Author