Walking along the paved street Early morning in mid March. The early spring hint, beaten back By insolent winter rampage. Stopping, buttoning coat, Looking downward, Toward buttons and shoes. Stooping, spying something familiar In the unfamiliar winter gasp. Warm hands gathering it. Uplifting what cannot move. Cupping it in soft palms, nail wounds Nearly healed, now healing the [...]
For the first time in a very long time, no one is second-guessing the decision by a police officer to use deadly force against an unarmed woman. Why? The storming of the Capitol was criminal and a disgrace. Assaults upon our democratic institutions, whether from the Right or the Left, should never be tolerated. At [...]
It has, after all, always been a harsh irony that you don’t know if a heart is working right until it is broken. You don’t know how much you love someone—or not love them, I suppose—until you must care for them all day, every day, with hardly a moment to breathe. “I really need to [...]
The only time you can be really sure that both the Republicans and Democrats are wrong is when they all agree with each other. This is certainly true in the recent case of poor Representative Mary Miller, besieged and berated on all sides for saying something that very few of us would ever really dispute. [...]
Gratitude remains the only key that unshackles us and lets us breathe free. We all unthinkingly use the phrase “the gift of life,” but it is only a gift if we really think of it as such. Myth is not fiction. Myth is truth that ignores the facts. Myths are the tales we tell each [...]
I sometimes still worry that all the publicity centering around 9/11 drowns out the cries of those who died that day. I don’t want that to happen. The tragedy of their dying was corrupted from the very start by our leaders who failed to understand why they died and who used their dying for their [...]
We should not try to right one historic wrong by committing a new one. After enduring over a century of white racism, now the Asian-American community must cope with a more subtle but just as sinister form of liberal racism: the harsh Orwellian reality that in modern America all minorities are equal, but some minorities [...]
Everything is going well, until it isn’t. Then it is the end of the world, until it isn’t. Unbridled confidence and unfounded panic are the poles we traverse, A jagged, looping path along which we cry beseechingly and grasp breathlessly. […]
The great question that perplexed progressives throughout much of the 21st century was how to completely untether us from the past, thereby for the first time in history truly liberating ourselves from our moorings and ushering in a new age of gender freedom, radical equality, and ethnic equity. The Crime His fingers twitched, but they [...]
I’m certain it was late March 1975. Or perhaps early April. My certainties are increasingly uncertain with each passing year. Whether late March or early April, I saw her for the first time at a nearby table in the university cafeteria. She was so lovely and animated that I could no longer hear the discussion [...]
I had barely opened my eyes and the sun was already setting. I had barely begun to breathe in the hot, humid air when a chill sliced across my throat and poured into my veins. I had just begun to smile easily, the sun radiating through my pores and the moon soothing my fevered songs of [...]
America would be a more wholesome, more unified, and more decent place if liberals stopped thinking they have a monopoly on compassion and intelligence and conservatives stopped thinking they have a monopoly on patriotism and God. Warning: This is not a twenty-years-too-late movie review of a loosely-adapted romantic-comedy of The Taming of the Shrew. Instead, [...]
Images certainly can be much more compelling than mere words. But like words, how images are used and when they are used are opportunities for manipulation. The photograph is unnerving. One cannot look at it without it breaking your heart. It is the sort of image that sticks in your mind forever and haunts you [...]
Last winter lies vanquished, Sprawled under lolling hills of green, Strangled amid red-berried brambles, Smothered deep beneath bare feet stomping along forest paths. Winter’s proud tyranny, Now humbled by the lilting laugh of children And drowned in dreams of unconquerable sun. […]