The Unclad Soul

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...

Lee Atwater was the infamous Republican strategist for both President Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Atwater made a career of dirty politics using highly effective but dishonorable skills to distort the positions of political opponents, smear their character, and basically humiliate and decimate them. He was not shy either about using racial and ethnic slurs and innuendos. Brash and often offensive he reveled in the political battles he created. At the height of his political career he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. A year later at age 40 he would be dead. The powerhouse bully, the supposedly brilliant political tactician, the guy who was feared by Democrats as well as Republicans, was reduced to the limits of a body and mind broken and dying. In the last months of his life he dropped all of the sneering hate and crippling abuse he had dished out to opponents. Humbled by the awareness of his own humanity and the stark reality of how fragile and momentary life can b...

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 ...

"True character arises from a deeper well than religion. It is the internalization of moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity. The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others." —   Edward O. Wilson , Harvard Professor/Pulitzer Prize Winner Author

There is an error in how our country is seen today. We appear to be a nation of angry, bigoted, mean-spirited, violent people. The picture is one of weakness and ingratitude, of people holding endless grudges, of crooked cops killing minorities, of shallow selfish Christians demanding everyone obey their beliefs, of incompetent predatory politicians desecrating democracy. It’s true; the country has its fair share of these people. And the dishonorable behavior and the loud voices of all of them overwhelm the good Americans everywhere. We are not well represented to the world. However, every day decent Americans do their jobs honestly, competently, and well. They care for their families. They follow the law. They respect the diversity of our country. They get along with their neighbors. They worship regularly and attempt to live by their beliefs; they don’t cram them down the throats of others or assume they alone own God. They are concerned about the environment and appreci...

“The good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.”  ~ Lionel Shriver,  Novelist

“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever”, he told the boy. “You might want to think about that.” “You forget some things, don’t you?” the boy said. “Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”  ― From The Road , by Cormac McCarthy