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Guns or Butter
Presidents Day should not only remind us of our history and honor our greatest leaders, but should inspire us to strive for greatness ourselves and remember that every one of us has a responsibility to lead by example. I offer another look at these thoughts from 2008.
A college senior’s experience in an upper-division seminar in sociology depends primarily on one factor: the professor. I had the best.
I had never had an instructor like Professor Dukes. On the surface, he often didn’t seem to teach. If he came into the classroom and found the students immersed in conversation, he might listen in for a while, then gradually enter into the conversation himself and steer it in a direction relevant to the broader aims of the course. His breezy style created an atmosphere where all his students felt themselves participants, rather than pupils, and for years after graduation I found my thoughts drifting back to sociology and Richard Dukes.
But one class in particular has stuck in my memory. That was the day Professor Dukes came into the room with a board game tucked under…
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Did you become what you thought you would be?
Guest post today by ReachingTheSun.
He said, “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get lose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” The Velveteen Rabbit.
I did not become what I thought I would become.
No, I didn’t.
I did not become rich and have never been on a shopping spree by my definition.
I have not finished my PhD, nor attempted starting one.
I did not become a famous musician or singer.
I have not become the carefree mother of many children.
I did not become a well…
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St. Patrick’s Day — Searching for the way out of exile
Every year on St. Patrick’s Day I revisit these thoughts from 1999. Things have gotten better in Ireland, where both sides have finally recognized that peace requires sacrifice and compromise. Not much has improved in Israel, where leaders on one side continue to hold their people hostage as political pawns so they can keep their own hold on power.
At first glance, the soggy, green downs of Ulster bear little resemblance to the parched and craggy hills of Israel. But a gentle tugging at the cultural fabric of either place unravels an unmistakable common thread: two peoples, impossibly close geographically, impossibly distant ideologically, with more than enough fuel for hatred between them to burn until the coming of the Messiah. Tromping over hills and through city streets, however, first in one place and then in the other, I discovered a more compelling similarity: the bitter struggle of humanity in exile.
“Which are the bad parts of town, the ones I should avoid?” I asked the owner of the bed-and-breakfast where I passed my first night in Belfast.
She dutifully pointed out the Shankhill neighborhood on my map, cautioning me to steer clear of it. I thanked her and, with sophomoric self-confidence, proceeded there directly.
It was the summer of…
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Frank Reagan for President
It’s election day in Missouri, and I don’t care what the polls say… I’m not giving up hope. #VoteForFrank
Highly principled, hard as nails, even-keeled, dedicated to higher values, devoted to the welfare of the people he serves, and fiercely loyal to those who serve under his command.
If he’s not available, I’d settle for Tom Selleck. Like Ronald Reagan, at least he would know how to act like a president.
Woman in Gold — Intolerance for Injustice
“Woman in Gold” is one of those stories, and one of those movies, that we need to hear and see to remind us that we’re in this world for something more than the comforts and pleasures of the here and now.
Maria Altmann was a woman in her eighties living in Southern California who decided that it was time to try to recover the portrait of her aunt that had been stolen by the Nazis and had hung in Vienna’s Belvedere Gallery for half a century.
Randal Schoenberg, grandson of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, was a corporate lawyer with a wife and baby who quit his job to take the case against the Austrian government that no one thought he could win.
Hubertus Czernin was an Austrian investigative journalist, the son of a Nazi driven to atone for the sins of his father by allying himself in the fight for truth.
Because ultimately, the story is not one about a painting, about Nazism, or even about the victory of three little people in their David-and-Goliath battle against governments and the corruption of power.
Ultimately, it is a story about intolerance for injustice, about the heeding the inner voice that calls us to take a stand against evil no matter what the cost, no matter how long the odds.
Because when we fight for justice, we always win — even if we lose.
Dangerous Freedom
With the holiday of Passover behind us, the dangers of freedom become more threatening than ever.
Freedom is a privilege, not an inheritance. Freedom is an obligation, not a right. Freedom calls us to duty, not to indulgence.
And the illusion of freedom may be the cruelest tyrant of all, seducing us into accepting the slavery of ego, impulse, and comfort.
Every day we should ask ourselves: are we fighting to deserve and to preserve the freedom that our fathers fought so hard for us to have?
Yonason Goldson 