The Unclad Soul

Franklin D. Roosevelt once said in one of his Fireside Chats, “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.” President John Kennedy said, “For only the President represents the national interest. Upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations of all parts of the country and all nations of the world.” President Lyndon Johnson once referred to the White House as “that house of decisions.” Moral leadership. The interest of the nation and the world. Critical decision making. Those are some of the most important responsibilities of the president of the United States. The presidency is not about brand; it’s not about endless rallies of off the cuff speeches filled with jokes and taunts. It was never intended to be a place of chaos, disorganized strategies, or useless press conferences where a spokesperson and not the preside...

The Sundance Now, BBC series, The Split, brilliantly captures the emotions, heartache, messiness, and collapse of relationships both in marriage and divorce. I recently subscribed to Sundance Now and while browsing the program selections found this gem. Marriage has got to be one of the most complicated of human relationships we will ever enter. Society, Church, and Hollywood, have too often created an illusion surrounding marriage that simply does not exist in reality. Marriage is hard work. Most relationships are. But marriage requires a stubborn love, a willingness to change and grow, an unconditional acceptance of the other in all of their character flaws, irritating habits, stubbornness, sensitivity to criticism, and well, just being a human being. The idea that we can be married a lifetime is a lovely concept, but life has a way of interrupting things, and staying together to the end is not for everyone. I have often suggested to friends there ought to be ter...

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, ...

Dear Conservative Friends, I’m torn. Some of you I have known for years. Some of you are close friends, people I love and admire and care about. So it makes it difficult for me to understand your politics sometimes and your devotion to president Trump, your tolerance of his divisive partisanship, your silence regarding his often hurtful comments, and your acceptance of his merry clan of White House associates and Congressional chums many of whom are clearly corrupt and many others who seem hell bent on making America one race (white of course), one religion (Fundamentalist Christian), one economy (for the wealthy), one issue (the 2 nd Amendment), and one truth (theirs). Now, I’m sure you can turn that all around and say something similar to me about Democrats or liberals or others you strenuously disagree with or dislike. Understood. But I’m honestly concerned about the way things seem to be going in the country. Yes, liberals and moderates have often been lousy at govern...

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...

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...

“We make progress in society only if we stop cursing and complaining about its shortcomings and have the courage to do something about them.” ~ Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Physician/Author Pictured here is Kikuko Shinjo, 89 years old, a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast. As a 17-year old nursing student she helped nurse victims of the carnage back to health. Many of them died in her care. She says she holds no grudge against America and encourages interaction between the Japanese and Americans. She has devoted her life to peace, saying, “I want all the people around the world to be friends, and I want to make my country peaceful without fighting.” Today she makes colorful paper cranes and donates them to the Children’s Peace Monument at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

“The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” ~ James Baldwin, Playwright/Poet/Novelist

I am a liberal in politics and religion. All of my friends know this. I am a seeker. They know this, too. I have never been comfortable with easy answers, with the accepted truth of the majority, with well-meaning but trite words of comfort. I want to find some deeper meaning to it all. I want to know there is a meaning. Beyond the shallowness of our current day there has to be more. More than the acrimony and alienation between so many of us. More than the shameless meanness of our leaders. More than the materialistic gluttony, the voracious urge for empty consumption of so many of us. We’re all appetite and no provision. Something has turned us sour, spoiled our sense of humanity, and left us rotting inside our vacant rituals. The election of a president in this country is now a tawdry spectacle of infantile behavior. The candidates preen and harangue and offer us not examples of capable leadership or even decent human conduct. Instead, they divide us with caus...

Memorial Day is not a time for bragging. It is not a day of rolling out the big ships and the stealth bombers and waving flags. It is not a day to rile the enemy or to make threats to others in the world. It is a day to remember the fallen. To mourn those who gave their lives in the always bloody and violent dread and horror that war is. My father, two of my uncles, one of my aunts, and my older brother all served in the military and made it through WWII and the Vietnam War. I lost two boyhood friends in Vietnam. I helped carry the coffin of one of them and could not believe his 19 year old life was gone, forever. War is an offense to humanity. A brutal and often senseless act of murder and destruction.   Einstein once said, “ "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding." We have not yet learned that in our country or hardly anywhere in the world. Today we should mourn that too.  Copyright 2015 Timothy Moody

"Scientists have discovered that the small brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy."  – Natalie Angier, Science Journalist and Writer

“Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn't matter which color does the hating. It's just plain wrong.” ~ Muhammad Ali 

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,...

My friend Jennifer Ables reminded me the other day that not all Republicans are bad. And she is right. And the frustrations and anger I express on here toward Republicans and the Tea Party is not directed at my friends like Jennifer. Not at all. Although, as I said to her, I don’t really understand how some of my friends can vote for and support Republicans since the party seems totally controlled now by Tea Party extremists.  People like Ted Cruz who cynically uses and manipulates voters in order to elevate himself. What has he done for America? I can't think of anything positive. He and his small but noisy crowd of followers in Congress seemingly have no interest in serving our country or helping make it better for all of our citizens. They appear to only care about playing the game, beating their opponents, making lots of money, and doing everything they can to smear President Obama and keep him from leading the country. Now, after weeks of holding the nation in limbo, hurt...

In Roland Merullo’s lyrical novel, “In Revere, In Those Days,” we find a loving and moving memoir of the lead character, Anthony (Tonio) Benedetto. Tonio grows up in Revere, Massachusetts, in a home of love with his struggling but hard working and adoring Italian-American parents. All is well until at age 11 his parents are killed in a plane crash. Young Tonio is crushed by this tragedy and overwhelmed by what seems like life’s harsh indifference. But his paternal grandparents, gentle people who treasure Tonio, enter into his grief and envelop him in a love so rich it fortifies him the rest of his life. His uncle Peter, too, steps in to be a caring father figure. Tonio eventually finds ways out of his sorrow and out of Revere. But there are other challenges and heartaches to face. And he learns to love through them as he was loved. Here is a story of family affection and commitment, sorrow, tragedy, society’s prejudices against immigrants, the struggle to survive in low paying wor...

We live in a divided and divisive country. In spite of the many advances that minorities have gained in America, racism is still a vicious and unyielding presence among us. Our political system wobbles feebly almost uselessly from the influences of corruption, bullheadedness, favoritism, malaise, haughtiness and indifference. Churches and the religious community once such a force for good and spiritual guidance are now often caught up in partisan political campaigning, serving politicians and clearly ignoring Jesus, not to mention the dispossessed, the sick, the young and the old, the hurting, the addicted, and the lonely. All across the country there hovers in the air a spirit of nastiness, wrangling, antagonism, and bitter discord and discourse. The story is told of a father and son sitting outside their house one summer evening talking and sipping iced tea. The night sky was a bit hazy but brilliant with stars and the son suddenly commented how beautiful the moons were abo...

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” ~ Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law Professor/Policy Advocate/Candidate for US Senate