The Unclad Soul

We are the land of liberty whose Statue’s flame never dims. We crossed the mapless ocean to escape the oppression of Church and government. We wrote a magnificent Constitution. We established laws, instituted a court system, and decreed all men free. We created communities, towns, and cities. We built schools and hospitals and churches. We fought foreign enemies. Helped defeat Nazis, dictators and tyrants. We made the world safer. We have not always been true to our ideals, but we learned and changed and became better. We are Lincoln, Babe Ruth, Martin Luther King, Jr. We are Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Maya Angelou. Compassion runs through our veins. We are helpers and healers, and goodness has always been our highest trait. We believe in free and excellent public education, in equal rights, in the value of every person. Though we have not always honored these values, they remain a central part of our identity and we have always strived to fulfill them. ...

While walking the track the other morning at the large high school behind where I live, I saw something that disturbed me. As I was making a turn there was a small group of boys at the end of the football field that is in the middle of the track. Standing far above the others was a big kid, maybe 6’2’, 250 pounds. He was waving something in his hand. There was a much smaller boy a few feet in front of him with his hands up in front of him. From a distance, I thought the big kid had a small football in his hand because he was waving the smaller boy out onto the field as though to catch something. Just as I got near them, I saw the big kid had a cell phone in his hand. He threw it long and high in the air. The smaller kid was awkwardly running to catch it, but it hit hard on the ground and bounced twice. The big kid just laughed along with the others and walked off. The smaller kid picked up his phone, put it in his pocket, and walked over to the group and sheepishly stood wi...

The courageous protest by the former professional football player, Colin Kaepernick, has been so misunderstood and misrepresented that the point of it has mostly been lost. After what seemed like an endless stream of shootings and killings of unarmed black men by white police officers, Kaepernick decided to do something. He didn’t riot or retaliate, scream profanities, or assault white people. Instead, he simply chose not to stand at the playing of the National Anthem before his games . It was not an attack on the American Flag, on the military, or the anthem. His action was simply saying that, for him, the battles of war that our soldiers have fought to make us “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” as spoken in The Star-Spangled Banner song, are not being honored. The violence of white cops against Blacks and the indifference of politicians and the courts to tolerate and excuse it was what Kaepernick was protesting. The National Anthem praises honor, courage, ...

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 ...

Playwright and screenwriter, Robert Ardrey, once wrote, “We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.” Which is to say, our acts of benevolence, kindness, love and generosity transcend our acts of terror, barbarity, murder, and mayhem. The unimaginable carnage, cowardly and beyond any possible reason, carried out Sunday by Devin Kelley, takes us to our knees. We collapse under the weight of such a beastly crime. How does anyone human carry out such an inhuman atrocity? Details are murky. The answers we need and want, and what will finally be revealed, if any at all, will not be sufficient. Whatever the motive or mental defect may have been, all we will be left with is that the depths of our individual capacity for evil and harm know no limits. Monstrous crimes are not new. But what seems to be dramatically different these days is the frequency of them, so that they are becoming not an aberration but a common reality. There is without question a poiso...

Cultural critic and novelist, Daniel Quinn, has written, “There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world…they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.“ Some of us grew up in a time when the church, the school, the government, and society at large, gave us a story to believe that asked us to live in accord with the world. There were always pockets of cynics, bullies, bigots and screwballs who rebelled and remained trouble makers attempting to divide people and communities. But for the most part, people tried to get al...

Let’s let it be said that too much of Christian religious talk and action today is a wild distortion of what we have traditionally understood Christianity to be. This fear driven, hostile, endlessly close-minded Christianity of today is a vulgar mishandling of faith. It is a treacherous attack not on liberalism, socialism, atheism. Its target is humanity. And with unscrupulous ferocity it is deadening the spirits of its followers, and, it is literally destroying any possibility of cooperative problem solving in this country. The institutional Church, whatever Christian form it currently takes—Protestant or Catholic, Liberal or Fundamentalist, Strip Mall setting or giant Multiplex Citadel—is in danger of total irrelevance simply because of the grotesque arrogance of today’s far right radical, strident, offensive Christians and their pervasive attacks on people they dislike. They’re not picky. They’re after anyone who does not walk in lock step with their extremism. This row...

I watched on C-Span last night Secretary of Health & Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, return to Congress’s Roman Arena, known as the House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing. There she was once again thrown to the Republican lions who had a delightful time ranting and fuming against this public servant. I watched her wither and age in the hour I forced myself to view the spectacle. She does not come across as a warm person, but then not many people have sunny dispositions while being stomped and chewed to pieces by drooling lunatics all in a frenzy of uncontrollable rage. The petty insults, the sneering condescension, the harassing bitterness spewed by Republican members of the Committee were a shameful and atrocious display of partisan politics. Many made no attempt to control their tempers. Some of their outbursts were blatantly acts of bullying and some even bordered on just outright cruelty. To treat a woman, a professional member of the President’s Cabinet,...