I have always had a fascination with heroes. As a child I loved learning about saints. Later when I began to realize that none of us are ever as perfect as I had imagined those blessed individuals to be I found new people to inspire me. Among them was John F. Kennedy. Even then I understood that at times he had disappointingly human failings but when his courage was most needed he more than once managed to rise to the occasion. During World War II he saved a number of his fellow crew members on PT 109 in an effort that left him plagued with chronic back pain for the rest of his life. During the terrifyingly dark October days of the Cuban missile crisis he maintained a strong and cool head managing not just to defer a possible nuclear strike on American soil but also to prompt the Soviet Union to dismantle the warheads that had been aimed so dangerously toward cities in the United States. Continue reading “We Need Heroes”
I have a rather sassy granddaughter. She reminds me much more of my mother and mother-in-law than of myself or my daughters. I suppose that I secretly enjoy that she is so much more willing to assert herself than I ever was. I spent most of my childhood and teenage years being quiet and polite and even a bit repressed. I was truly afraid to be the person that I wanted to be or to express the opinions that rattled inside my brain. My granddaughter doesn’t even come close to being like that. 
If you follow my blogs regularly you had to know that I would not be able to resist the temptation to write about Donald Trump. For those of you who tend to be off put by political dialogue the short version of my analysis is that The Donald is and always has been a fake, a charlatan, a super salesman and huckster. Which is to say that he is a politician on steroids. Frankly I don’t think that we have seen a truly real and noble leader in my lifetime with the exception of Jimmy Carter who was eventually eaten alive by the usual folk who hang around the halls of government. Donald Trump is little more than a caricature of the political animal. If I thought that he had even a ghost of a chance of becoming the President of the United States I would be investigating the possibility of sitting out the next many years in Canada. Luckily I believe that rational Americans are already beginning to see through the smoke and mirrors that have been his stock and trade throughout his career.
We all know people who seem to have incredibly bad luck. Perhaps one of those people may even be you. We find ourselves wondering why this is so. How is it possible, we ask, that some among us lead seemingly charmed lives and others get pounded by fate over and over again? Is there really some cosmic karma that chooses unsuspecting souls for the worst possible situations? Aren’t the laws of probability supposed to work out in favor of distributing both the good and the bad? Why does God allow some to suffer while others appear to never have a care in the world? As humans we sometimes contemplate such things but never really understand what the true answers may be.
