The Unclad Soul

In her searing memoir, “Hope Against Hope,” Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote, “I decided it is better to scream.” Then she wrote, “Silence is the real crime against humanity.” She knew something about pain, horror, death. Her husband, a gifted poet, suffered endless persecution under Stalin. He died on his way to the Siberian gulag, humiliated and alone in the cold. She tells his story of sorrow in her memoir. After this week’s school murders in Santa Fe, Texas, even screaming seems useless. And though silence, too, is no solution, and worse, very well a crime in the face of so much bloodshed, one is nevertheless left in feelings of stone silence. What else can be said? We’re all tired of the empty religious jumble. Prayers and accepting God’s Will and all of that. Doesn’t work for me. It blasphemes anyone’s true faith. Our politicians have lost all sense of reality. They live in some cocoon of their own making, hiding from these horrific, senseless, obscene killings. Th...

The Independent , a UK online news source, reported this week that Jack Wood, a 15-year-old boy from South London rescued a baby and a grandmother from a burning house. Jack was walking to school when he saw smoke coming from a neighbor’s house. He knows the family and knew a baby and grandmother lived there. He called his mother and told her to call the fire department. Then he ran into the house and grabbed the baby and put it on the lawn outside. He then went back into the house and got the grandmother and led her out to safety. Then he went back into the house, found a bucket, filled it with water and proceeded to put out the fire until the fire department got there. “I just wanted to get the baby and the gran out and make sure the fire was out,” Jack told reporters. All three were treated for smoke inhalation, but Jack was called a hero for saving the lives of the baby and the grandmother. Kids today, like kids in all days, are so easily dismissed. But young people today are ...

From the Desiderata by poet Max Erhmann – A line a day for the remaining Holiday season: “Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.” (I struggle a bit with this one. I don't want to give up everything of my youth. I'm trying to age gracefully. But for me, it's not always easy. ~ TM)

I am a prisoner of Richard Martinez’s haunting words at the brief press conference last Saturday where he poured out his heart about the senseless death of his son Chris who was murdered last Friday in Santa Barbara, California. I cannot escape his emotional words. Choking with grief, consumed with rage, he passionately asked why his son had to die for nothing. Christopher Martinez and five others killed by a gun obsessed, volatile and deranged classmate, were all students at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Chris was 20 years old. At the press conference his father said, “Chris was a really great kid. Ask anyone who knew him. His death has left our family lost and broken. Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness!’ Too many have died. We should say to ourselves, ‘Not one more!’” ...

The enigmatic and unconventional artist and filmmaker, Andy Warhol, once said that we all have our own America. He said it consists of “Pieces of a fantasy America” that we think exists but which we really don’t see. He said we created this America from scenes in movies, from music lyrics, and from novels and other books. The result, he said, is an America made up of “art and schmaltz and emotions.” I find a lot of truth in that. We have the recorded history of this country in thousands of books and speeches and other forms of documentation and they all tell stories of hardship and courage, genius and empty-headedness, brotherhood and bigotry, slavery and freedom, cruelty and compassion, stampeding greed and astonishing charity, gross decadence and simple living. We continue making American history and what we’re currently up to will not read well in future years. Today, we find our country crippled by a political system that has outlived itself and is so dysfunctional it ha...