Grieving what we have lost in America
The great pine tree on the south side of our house, with its intricate weave of branches and fulsome long green needles, has long been a favorite landing place for osprey whose nest is a little bit down river. Quite often we fail to see an osprey cocooned in the tree limbs until it suddenly swoops…
Americans Respond to the Attack on Iran
No turn of history occurs for only one reason. A convergence of influences made President Trump decide to join with Israel to launch an attack on Iran. There are reasons, there are rationales, there are calculations, there are ramifications. And there is the gut. Pundits have addressed all these threads in the past days and…
Minneapolis is showing us what protest can and should should look like… it also demonstrates the human cost
On January 24, as she announced the program at a packed performance of the Cape Symphony in Hyannis, Massachusetts, Maestro Alyssa Wang introduced a work by Arnold Schoenberg by describing his situation as a Jew composing modernist music in Berlin in the 1930s. With Hitler’s rise to power, Schoenberg’s music was declared “degenerate,” and as…
Liberal societies can be saved, but only if we decide to save them
Book Review of Autocracy, Inc.: The dictators who want to run the world by Anne Applebaum, Doubleday, 2024. The following review was published on August 5, 2025 on the website www.WeAreOneHumanity.org. We who grew up in the West in the immediate post-World War II world assumed that rule of law, humanitarianism, human rights, international cooperation,…
June 14, 2025
Things in the US have taken a serious turn during the past week. On June 6, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ramped up its raids in Los Angeles, taking people off the streets without, in many cases, even knowing their names, ignoring the right of all people to be served a warrant if they are…
We Are Living in a New Reality: Donald Trump 2.0
This column was posted today on the website We Are One Humanity. In the name of eradicating waste and fraud and “making America great again,” President Trump has found common cause with a highly organized 40 year project to create a “unitary presidency” and to unravel many features of the US’s regime of fairness and…
For Americans the future has arrived
The events of the past week force Americans to pull out of hibernation and get to grips with what is to come. Please see my post on the website of We Are One Humanity. https://www.weareonehumanity.org/contributing-writers/kti0y21isenomhtk97iylsiu50brdo
American Bounty
This week Americans travel home for Thanksgiving. In spite of inclement weather forecasts, a record eighty million people will be on the move. Families will reconnect, turkey will be eaten, football will be watched. Traditionally we thank God for the extraordinary bounty of this country. But many of us are right now feeling the…
Thank you, Kamala Harris
Thirty-six hours to go… And so, in the end, is it really about her being a woman? Many particular factors have made this presidential election cycle exceptional: for starters, the inability of both parties to bring in new blood, making the two original candidates the oldest and second-oldest presidential candidates in American history; Trump’s legal…
Bobos Busted
Twelve days to go…. On a flight back to the US from Europe several weeks ago, the man sitting beside me struck up a conversation when he noticed I was reading an article on conservativism in the US. He made it clear he considered himself a conservative, and traditionally a Republican, but right now, he…