The Unclad Soul

In my innocence I grew up believing in the goodness of people and all things. My parents and grandparents modeled this in front of me. I saw in them patience. Joy. Human warmth. Integrity. I felt their love and affection. I observed and absorbed their goodness.  I grew up extremely sheltered because of this. My world was small, provincial, full of church life.  I had great school friends. As a teen my buddies were not necessarily honor roll, but they were smart, athletic, and fun to be around. My girlfriends were cute, clever, flirtatious and, yes, honor roll.    Aren’t most girls? In college I wanted to be a broadcast journalist. I loved my speech and radio and TV production classes. But then, after an emotional church service I attended, I believed, as it was described then, that I was being “called into the ministry.” It wasn’t until I had my first rural church as a single, young, naive minister, barely out of college, that I began to understand t...

(Note: This may be hard to take, but I think it's necessary. - TM) President Trump took his road show to Houston, Texas this week. He was there to support the Senate candidacy of Ted Cruz. However, he barely mentioned Cruz. Most of the speech was about, as usual, himself. One of the most disturbing things he said was a threat to send the military to the border to stop what he calls “the caravan” of refugees from Honduras and Guatemala from entering the U.S. First of all, he cannot legally do that. There is an Act that prohibits the military from engaging in civilian law enforcement outside of military bases (The Posse Comitatus Act). And secondly, really? Just ignore these desperate people? Without the slightest proof and with a desire to continue to scare his base, he claimed gangs, murderers, rapists, and terrorists are basically the people in the caravan. “We don’t want them,” he yelled to the crowd, who of course cheered and applauded. I don’t care to go on ab...

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...

Two things. Vice President Pence left an NFL game last Sunday because some players took a knee at the playing of the National Anthem. He said they were disrespecting the American flag. Second, Dallas Cowboy’s owner Jerry Jones has now said his players will all stand at the playing of the National anthem or else they can’t play. He said his players will respect the flag. Okay, I get this obsession with the flag, which is only a symbol. I’ve written about both the absurdity and the danger of worshipping a symbol of freedom while denying people human and equal rights. Pence and Jones are playing to the worst fears and prejudices in people. To deny professional football players, or anyone else, the right to express their disappointment and their disapproval of how certain police officers and police forces are mistreating, often outright killing, unarmed suspects, especially black men, ought to bother all Americans. Power and money do not give anyone the right to silence protest of...

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...

“When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear; angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your private score is.” ~ Excerpt from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye

I have just finished watching Ken Burns’ magnificent series, “The Civil War.” I saw it when it first aired on PBS some years ago but I wanted to return to it. The racial unrest in our country today is hauntingly and shockingly similar to the racial divide in the country a hundred and fifty years ago. Think of that. We are still fighting that long, bloody, wasteful and savage war.  President Lincoln wanted to keep the Union together, strengthen it against any foreign power, and make America a country free for all of its citizens. But slavery in the South prompted leaders there to secede from the Union and form their own government under a new president, Jefferson Davis. They saw where Lincoln was taking them and they refused to go there. There have been calls for secession again in the past few years. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry was one who flaunted that threat. As usual, it was a political ploy for him and nothing more. But he stirred up people ready to separate t...

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...

If we have any feelings at all injustice has a feel to it. It digs deep within us and causes pain. It gnaws and twists and our insides growl in disgust. It feels ugly and foul and obscene. We see it and we wince. We think to ourselves, God, look at that. That is viciously wrong. That is grossly unfair. That is inhuman. We feel that. We feel it deep within us. If we don’t then injustice is ignored and injustice ignored allows evil to exist. It shrugs its shoulders at the sight of monstrous wrongs. It is bored with something being right, being fair, being equal. It yawns while the blood of the innocent spills slowly in front of it. Injustice is not moved by violence or death. Injustice turns away disinterested. Injustice thrives on excusing itself of responsibility. It elevates itself above laws or rights or decency. It struts. It grins. It believes it is invincible. It was injustice that cleared Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson of any crime for killing unarme...

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 have written about this before but it has to be said again. The murderous brutality showered upon the Palestinians by the Israeli military and Israel’s political leaders is a travesty beyond, in my opinion, any justification. Where are the voices for peace between Arabs and Jews? Where are world leaders saying enough of this bloodbath between Israel and Palestine? Where is there even a single recognizable person of influence willing to ask why Israel continues to destroy Gaza, building by building taking with them the lives of children and people simply wanting to have a normal life? Where are those voices? There are none. I understand all of the arguments against Hamas and its group of violent extremists. But there is nothing fair about the imbalance of power between Israel and Palestine. And why the world is not opposing this I cannot understand. Journalist and author Joshua Frank has made the obvious point that the continuous push of Israel to ultimately remove Palest...