The Unclad Soul

And now, the struggle for authenticity beckons. The fight for what is real in our world, in our nation, and in ourselves, that fight exists whether we participate in it or not. War is real. Syria is real. Children dying, their small bodies broken in pieces, blood running from their frail faces. That is real. Iraq is real. Afghanistan. Yemen. The horror that stalks the days there, the screams heard through the nights. The innocent brutalized. The cities decimated. Those are all real. We ignore it. We pretend those things are far away from here, that we are not a part of it, that we have no responsibility for it. We close our eyes, our minds, our hearts to it. I can’t turn away, can you? And here, in dear old America, our flag sags under the weight of our mutual shame. Reagan’s tired description of us, “a shining city on a hill,” rings discordant, empty, false. We do not shine; we are tarnished with the stains of our selfishness, our shallow cravings, our racism and ...

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 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...

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,...

There is a large element of Democratic and Republican voters in this country who feel betrayed by their parties. Trump and Hillary and their handlers and the establishment big shots in both parties seem oblivious to this fact.  Yes, this is a great country and all of that. But folks, our political system is tragically, disastrously broken. It does not represent the majority of our citizens. Anyone who cannot see that is simply living in some kind of unyielding denial. I don’t know what will happen in the Republican Party. Their convention this summer will likely be a hot mess. But I can assure you, with all of the condescending calls from Hillary’s cheerleaders to dismiss Bernie supporters, the Democratic convention will be no less chaotic. All the pundits have declared her the nominee and many even the president. To discount so many with that kind of disdainfulness may very well create shocking consequences at the convention. There are groups of people in America who ...

There are forces in society today that keep luring us into some kind of primitive, relic thinking; thinking that is stripped of compassion and decency and thrives only on some prehistoric brutal mode of survival. It is thinking that is soaking in psychologically damaging fear. It fills us with paranoid dread and suspicion. In this thinking we forget how to care about others. We are too busy building some safe zone for ourselves, some small bubble of existence that keeps out all the bad things and all the bad people. It is thinking that shrivels and diminishes us into people almost unrecognizably human. Hate radio is a part of these forces; voices dripping with the most crude, vicious hateful stuff, meant to divide us from our better thoughts and acts and from one another. So are horribly biased TV pundits who cash in on scaring people, who make up outrageous lies for the sheer pleasure of ratings and big salaries. Bogus politicians who are basically just puppets with financial str...

The country woke up this morning to more madness. A white, apparently deranged young man in South Carolina, killed 9 people at a Bible study in a historic Black church. Police are calling it a hate crime. More details will obviously come in but here is what is undeniable. Our country is out of control. We have lost our way and it is not by accident. We as a people have chosen to allow our nation to be violent, hateful, prejudiced, bigoted, unjust, and inhuman. When this young man is caught, if he does not end up shooting himself in some cowardly panic, let the psychiatrists do their analyses. Let law enforcement prescribe the punishment. Let those who want to coddle him because they’ll say he’s insane do so. Let the gun lovers make excuses for him as they always do. Let the whites clamor on about mixed messages and make their phony allowances for him as they will. But here is the reality. This guy is the product of an unapologetic racist society. He is the result of our primit...

I have once again subjected myself to tedium and irrelevance by watching Meet the Press. Chuck Todd, the host, grilled the Mayor of Baltimore. Grilled her over and over about protestors, people in the streets who rioted and looted. But he has no grilling for the police. He showed a clip of Baltimore’s police commissioner saying the six police officers charged with crimes against Freddie Gray did nothing wrong. Really? The man committed no crime. He was in possession of a legal knife folded and in a holster not a switchblade as the police and the media announced. He asked for medical help right after he was handcuffed. They drove him all over Baltimore banging around in the back of a van with his hands and feet shackled. He asked over and over while in the van for medial help and was denied it each time. He lost consciousness in the van. He went into a coma at the hospital and died. But the police did nothing wrong? What happened in Baltimore is not about black poverty. It’s not ab...

The failure of the Staten Island grand jury to offer some semblance of fairness regarding the death of Eric Garner is an outrageous act of incompetence if not just outright criminal. The notion that there is some unbending legal structure that prevents grand juries from at least proceeding with a trial of police officers has a demoralizing effect on society. If police officers are exempt from the laws they have been hired to enforce then justice is lost and the whole purpose of obedience to the laws of our nation is meaningless. Grand juries that refuse to hold those in law enforcement accountable, including state prosecutors, reveal a level of misconduct that is simply unacceptable. Street protests, shutting down traffic and commerce peaceably, and other responsible acts of demonstration are all protected by our Constitution. In a free society citizens have the right to express their exasperation over what they believe to be injustice. And I support all responsible effort...

Michael Brown “Evil is committed when clarity is taken away from what is clearly wrong, allowing wrong to be seen as less wrong, excusable, right.” – John Hartung, Physician/Author

I don’t want to discuss President Obama’s speech to the nation about dealing with ISIS. I’m so weary with war. I don’t want to hear Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell launch another arrogant attack against the president. I don’t want to see any more beheading videos. I don’t want to watch people being swallowed up in floods and typhoons and mountain slides. I don’t want to hear anymore petty whining about defenseless children coming here from vicious countries hell bent on abusing and killing them. I don’t want any more lectures from Republican Congress members about how horrible everything is in the nation when they won’t lift a finger to do a damn thing about any of it. I don’t want to watch another unarmed young black man being shot to death by a gang of cowardly white cops. I don’t want to see anymore senseless beatings by bullying rogue cops. I don’t want to see anymore backward hillbilly racist Ferguson, Missouri’s. I don’t want to view another video of a pampered rich footb...

It is time to face the facts in this country. We are dangerously divided. You can’t sugarcoat it by saying it’s always been this way between people and groups. You can’t dismiss it as just life in contemporary society. You can’t pretend there is any middle ground any longer. The evolutionary biologist and author, Richard Dawkins, has said, “When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.” How true. It’s not that the Democrats are a little right and the Republicans are, too. It’s no longer true that both sides share basically the same political ideals. They don’t. Maybe once, but not anymore. Democrats are not without their own hypocrisies, blunders, irritating passiveness, and cheap compromises. But there are clear differences in the crafting of traditional, well meaning, good for all of society political legislation, which they are still commit...

While sitting in the doctor’s office the other day I picked up a copy of “Parents” magazine. Not only does it have excellent articles with terrific parenting advice but I couldn’t help noticing the diversity of the people both children and adults in every single picture in the magazine. The ads, the photos accompanying each article, everywhere you turned a page, there was a different ethnic group represented: Blacks, Asian, Latino, and Anglo. I thought, yes, that is really what our society looks like. We are a huge melting pot of nationalities, races, cultures, ethnicities, likes and dislikes. What a beautiful, pluralistic, multicultural country we live in. Think of what we could accomplish if as an entire nation we totally welcomed, fully accepted, and genuinely embraced the diversity of the people that we are? Think of the variety of artists, writers, actors, musicians, poets, and other creative, thinking people we have in this country? They are a mix of races all of them;...

Rick Santorum’s surge and second place finish in the Iowa caucus represents one of the most cynical aspects of this already bizarre and empty presidential campaign. And that is the so called “Evangelical” vote. Who are these people? Some of them are good and decent church going folks who think they are supporting Christian values. They simply like anyone like Santorum who says religious and conservative things and so they give him their full trust. They are often fearful people who think the world is evil and hope someone will rescue them from life’s hard realities and get rid of drugs and terrorists and divorce and so forth. They think someone like Santorum can do this by legislating morality. Others are angry, ungenerous, bigoted people who hide behind their religious faith and use it to sanction their rejection and dislike and in some cases hatred for gays, blacks, immigrants, and liberals. They do not follow Jesus. They do not really believe his teachings. Read the Ser...