The Unclad Soul

In Cormac McCarthy’s pulverizing novel, “The Road,” we enter the final years perhaps months or days of civilization. The world is a burned out place of depressing despair, the result of climate change ignored, the waste of precious resources, the rape of the land and its beauty, the viciousness of marauding wars, and the cruel cold inhumanity of people, the end result of human beings diminished to their most primitive drives—violent, savage, diabolical. A father and his young son are on “the road” to basically nowhere. They are just trying to survive and to hold on to the slightest thread of humanity left in them. Everything is dead. The waters of the ocean are black. Plants and flowers are all gone. Animals lay decomposed in their bleached skeletons everywhere. Ashes cover the earth. The sky is a dismal grey haze, a withering glare of menace. It is cold. Dirty snow falls. And the man, unnamed, perhaps in his 40s, stops at one point to reflect on what once was. He looks around at ...

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

“You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.”   ―   Alain de Botton, British Philosopher

“If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save.” ~ James Baldwin, Author/Essayist

“War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.”   ―   Adrienne Rich, American Poet/Writer

I have once again subjected myself to tedium and irrelevance by watching Meet the Press. Chuck Todd, the host, grilled the Mayor of Baltimore. Grilled her over and over about protestors, people in the streets who rioted and looted. But he has no grilling for the police. He showed a clip of Baltimore’s police commissioner saying the six police officers charged with crimes against Freddie Gray did nothing wrong. Really? The man committed no crime. He was in possession of a legal knife folded and in a holster not a switchblade as the police and the media announced. He asked for medical help right after he was handcuffed. They drove him all over Baltimore banging around in the back of a van with his hands and feet shackled. He asked over and over while in the van for medial help and was denied it each time. He lost consciousness in the van. He went into a coma at the hospital and died. But the police did nothing wrong? What happened in Baltimore is not about black poverty. It’s not ab...

“It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.”  ~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer