The Unclad Soul

The Oscar-winning  film, Roma (Best Foreign Language Film), tells the story of an upper-middle-class  Mexican family in Mexico City in the 1970s. There is chaos everywhere. In the streets. In political unrest. And in this family. The father, a businessman who is often away on trips and who eventually leaves, apparently for another woman, causes profound crises within his struggling family. The wife and mother, Sophia, tries to carry on, hiding the truth from her boisterous four children. But as times goes on she craters under the reality of her failing marriage and enveloping loneliness and she tells the children their father is not coming home. Teresa, Sophia’s mother who lives with them, is a matronly sympathetic and caring older woman, but she is helpless in corralling the rowdy children. It is Cleo, played by first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio, who as nanny and housemaid, successfully manages this disordered family. The character is based on a tru...

The New Year begins with some startling statistics. In a recent article on Counterpunch, Dr. Lawrence Wittner, Professor of History emeritus at the State University of New York, offered a shocking list of dismal statistics regarding the state of America. We are first in the world’s military spending. In August of 2018, the president and Congress passed a gargantuan military budget of $717 billion. Can you imagine what that amount of money could do for American infrastructure, public education, health care, social services, and immigration reform? According to Demos, a public policy organization out of New York City, it would take approximately $175 billion to eliminate poverty in America. Eliminate it! Think about that. And yet, our war spending continues to climb. The Program for International Student Assessment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently gave its latest report. In testing 540,000 students from 72 nations, American studen...

The rare and provocative poet and novelist, Charles Bukowski, once wrote, “If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.” That is a challenge I take for the New Year. I want my soul burning with purpose and desire. I want to be to be crispy by the end of 2019. I want to be the ashes of my longings fulfilled, my passions spent. I want to know my efforts were all out, that I left nothing in the pursuit of what I love that was not exhausted. I want to find ways to love new people and I want to find ways to better love the people I already know and cherish. I want my horizons expanded, stretched to new sights, beyond old borders of comfort and ease. Let there be places in my journey, where, like the ocean, on a clear day you can see forever, and the end of the water’s edge disappears in the blue sky of wonder. I want that. Let there be ...

In this Season of Advent, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, candles, food and festivities, giving and cheer, I keep thinking of Bob Marley’s beautiful music, especially his, “Redemption Song.” “Old pirates, yes, they rob me Sold me to the merchant ships Minutes after they took me From the bottomless pit But my hand was made strong By the hand of the Almighty We forward in this generation Triumphantly Won't you help to sing These songs of freedom? Redemption songs …” That is the message of this Season, whatever tradition you follow. Pirates still exist. People are still being sold in sex trafficking and sold out in politics. There are minorities and the elderly, the homeless and the disabled, who remain in the bottomless pit. Won’t you help to sing the songs of freedom? The Statue of Liberty is firmly anchored in New York Harbor, her light still beaming. But freedom escapes many beneath her lamp. People caught in poverty, in opioid addiction, in low w...

(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...

I saw him as I pumped gas in my car at the Shell Station. It was hot outside and he was sitting in the shade in front of the convenience store. An older man, thin, African American, with a scruffy two or three-day growth of white stubble and shaggy salt and pepper hair. As I walked into the convenience store to get a soft drink he smiled at me with uneven teeth. There was a warmth in his smile. He didn’t ask for anything. But I knew he was there to accept any change anyone might give him. I returned to my air-conditioned car and stared at him for a minute. As I drove out I went around to where he was and rolled down my window. I motioned for him to come over. He slowly got up and walked to my car. “Yes sir?” he said. I handed him some cash and said, “What is your name, friend?“ He said, “Carl.” I said, “You have a good day, Carl.” He smiled and put his hands together and bowed and said, “Oh, God bless you, sir. God bless you.” I don’t know his situation. But whatever it is I f...

This is one of my favorite poems by writer Jorge Luis Borges: “Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors. The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside. Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them. Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air. Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack. They speak of humanity. My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty. They speak of homeland. My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls. Time is living me. More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude. They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow. My name is someone and anyone. I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.”  There is so much yearning in these words. Such honest beauty. Borges expresses hope ...

In Ray Bradbury’s troubling futuristic short story, “The Million-Year Picnic,” a family takes a trip to Mars. The father calls it a vacation, but without telling his wife and sons, he is leaving planet Earth for good and taking them with him. Not long after they land and start their journey on the red planet, their rocket ship self-destructs in the background, and the family realizes they won’t be going home. The father is a practical and sensitive man and he had lost hope in Earth’s potential. He later takes his three boys fishing and while two of the boys are busy at the edge of the water, the other son notices his father’s behavior. He sees him distracted, nervous, lost in his thoughts, standing upright and looking   across   the sky, not realizing his father is thinking of Earth and the wars there, the hate, the endless killing and disorder, the ruined cities and the broken people.  The son moves toward his father: “What are you looking at so hard, Dad?” ...

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 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 ...

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,  for they shall be filled. Suzanne Collins’ bestselling novels and now movies, “The Hunger Games,” are set in a dark future following the moral and economic destruction of North America. Survivors comprise the wealthy and the poor and the vast distance between them. The wealthy class hunger for entertainment and have devised a cruel form of it requiring games of death. “Tributes” are selected in a national lottery, mostly poor teens, who are pitted against other teens in dangerous settings that eventually allow only one surviving winner. The rest are killed off by each other one by one. The poor class of course sees no humor or entertainment in these games and hunger instead for survival, for justice, for some way to end the madness. It’s a world of twisted values and wasted living. There are, however, parallels to this and the words of Jesus. There have always been those who crave wealth and power, who tolerate m...

The politics of our day is a deadening force. The angry divisiveness, the arrogant partisanship of it all, the refusal to cooperate with others, the obsession of winning at all costs even if it costs the nation its dignity and its worth, is a bitter reality. I’m unclear as to what brought us here. Why our politicians failed to evolve and became instead a crowd of petty, juvenile, angry, warped and one-sided tyrants is debatable but it discredits all of us. It is impossible to move the country forward if our chief lawmakers have no interest in anything but their own political careers; if they care about nothing but holding onto their elected offices even if it requires them to compromise themselves into some form of prostitution, the selling of themselves to corporate giants and the czars of finance. Which many if not most have already done. Our current presidential campaign is a humiliating display of defective candidates. The Republicans have paraded before us a crowd of ...

The world today aches. It trembles with pain. It longs for something kind and good and human. People are tired. Worn down by the hatred of cold and calculating tactics of the powerful. Weary to the point of despair because of an unfair and unjust system that works only for the few, for people with influence and wealth and who alone pull all of the essential levers of life, always in their favor. Most of our modern world, including America, is lost in a sea of corrupt financial vandalism. The greed of the powerful knows no limit. Although that greed is primarily carried out by polished men in expensive suits whose lives glitter in luxury and extravagance, their greed nonetheless oozes out of them like a foul discharge. Their Joker smiles betray any attempt at normalcy. Their giddy gluttony is not the attractive superiority they boast or they presume. Instead it pollutes and harms and ruins. And for many if not most of them their wealth is by no means a sign of high intelligence or ...

“There are far too many silent sufferers.  Not because they don't yearn to reach out, but because they've tried and found no one who cares.” ~ Richelle E. Goodrich, Writer/Author

On my usual way to lunch to pick up a sandwich at Subway across from the Central Library, I made my way down Canton Street, past the Dog Park at Cesar Chavez Boulevard, around the curve to the intersection at Harwood Street when I saw him. He was a large man with full long greasy hair to his shoulders. I often see him in the area. The First Presbyterian Church's soup kitchen is near that intersection and many days he is sitting or standing along the outside wall. He is always dressed in bulky jeans and a heavy coat and he's always carrying in both hands old plastic sacks full of unidentifiable things. Food perhaps. Or items of clothing. Or maybe just stuff he has found along his daily sidewalk journeys down the lonely streets of the urban city. At the corner of Harwood and Canton (which becomes Young Street) is a small flower garden and fountain just outside the side entrance of the old large First Presbyterian Church. That's where I saw him. Several cars were in front ...