Certain symbols make us flinch. A few years back when a group camping near me and Mike displayed a white supremacist flag I was immediately taken aback. When they called their dog “Negro” and they were not Hispanic I became even more upset. I joked about it at the time but my true feelings were a sense of internal rage that they would be clinging to such hateful imagery. I was quite happy when they left even though the campsite where they had been was abandoned in such a messy state that vultures came to eat up all of the trash. My single thought was that the birds had missed a feast on the biggest garbage of all. Continue reading “Take It Down”
Category: Commentary
To Serve and Protect
We often herald individuals who are willing to enter a fray to help someone who is in distress but the reality is that it can in fact be dangerous to render aid without knowing the full situation. My grandfather loved to speak of his experiences as a young man. One oft told tale was about a time that he was in a bar. Grandpa eventually became a teetotaler but in his youth he liked to imbibe after a long day of construction work. He didn’t marry until he was in his forties so going out for a little bit of the hair of the dog was a way to scare away his loneliness. He often sat by himself just enjoying the company of strangers and observing the goings on. Continue reading “To Serve and Protect”
I hear a number of people complaining that life is just not as good as it once was in the United States of America. The grumbling comes from liberals and conservatives alike. Some worry about the economic state of the average person and others are more concerned with the state of health of our laws. Still others ponder the moral fabric of society and see things that frighten them. I sometimes feel as though we all doth protest too much. I’ve been around for sixty six years and for the most part I think that we have never been better. We tend to stretch our concerns way out of proportion as though these are the worst of times. History tells a very different story. Continue reading
When the Emporer Has No Clothes
We humans have done some strange things throughout history, often in the name of good. Slavery is an obvious blunder and for the life of me I will never be able to fully comprehend how anyone at anytime was able to believe that owning another human being was not wrong. Indentured servitude was bad enough but at least my ancestors who found passage to America by binding themselves to a contract for their labor knew that they would one day be free once they had worked off their debt. Slavery is just so heinous and so much of history is replete with stories of conquered groups of humans being used to build cities and fortunes. It took Moses to free the Israelites from Egypt and Abraham Lincoln to do the same for African Americans in the United States. Continue reading “When the Emporer Has No Clothes”
Finding the Truth
There was a time when I thoroughly enjoyed perusing the the newspaper each morning. I was originally a Houston Post fan and the daily delivery that outlined local, national, and international events was my eye on the world along with a subscription to Newsweek. Alas, The Houston Post eventually closed its doors so I switched to The Houston Chronicle but I was never as fond of the columnists and editorial writers of that paper. Eventually I grew weary of seeing so many grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors inside its pages and I let my subscription lapse. When I see copies of it on the news stand today I realize that it is a shell of its former self. I fear that it is slowly dying and that worries me. A city the size of Houston should have a vibrant local newspaper and it doesn’t. Over time Newsweek became so pathetic that it went out of business. The last few copies of that once robust magazine were thin and cheap looking and the articles all had a sameness about them. It seemed as though a single journalist had penned every story, all of which had a definite liberal political bent. Continue reading “Finding the Truth”
