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. [...]
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 [...]
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. […]
Before legal codes were hammered into stone tablets, there were customs that enshrined a code of conduct for all warriors. And this code has always been founded on an unfathomable paradox: that those we kill we must also honor. It’s a familiar story. A soldier’s rage. In fairness, we might even call it righteous [...]
In the Year of the Dragon The Lion fell: Exhausted, confused, Lost in the thickening mist of age and pain, His brittle claws still deep in the flesh of his prey, His iron, toothless jaw still clamped on Life’s throat. […]
I. Who is there? No one. Do I know you? Do you? Don’t answer my question with a question! Who are you? A friend. I have had enough of friends. I think you have had enough of many things. Who are you? That doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I have come to [...]
Each day a little further into the mist she seeps, Each night more tightly she clings to the real. The fog enfolds, ensnares, envelops: Like a besieged city she remains steadfast and forlorn. […]
I love you with every breath. I inhale and you fill me with fire; I exhale and am emptied of pain. I love you when I look up through the sky, I love you when I look down toward the earth. I am more in love with you each day. […]
National Security Advisor John Bolton has thus far failed to maneuver the world into yet another Made-in-America Middle East conflict. Yet he might soon have the justification he wants. In the American lexicon there is never any such thing as wars of aggression. We prefer calling them wars of liberation. This has not been [...]
The history of Sri Lanka through the Fifties to the present time is a sobering reminder to those who fail to see that unrestrained democracy can lead to the tyranny of the majority and that robust diversity is as often a cause of friction and strife as it is a strength to be celebrated. [...]
On this Good Friday, as we ponder the suffering Christ endured, we should not forget the pivotal role of that good and decent bureaucrat Pilate in facilitating that crime. Nor forget the bureaucratic crimes committed daily on the sacrificial altars of obedience and expedience. Thus spoke Nietzsche: “Must I add that, in the whole [...]
I regretted having children because children fundamentally altered my entire life in a way I never expected they would. For literally the first time in my life I was afraid of the future and unsure of what would happen next. I had willfully, foolishly, unthinkingly, given hostages to fortune. It was just the two [...]
Those who make too much of Representative Ilhan Omar’s statement, and who are happy to gain some short-term win by conflating legitimate concern over Israeli influence with anti-Semitism, run the risk of permanently connecting the two terms... I was sitting under a huge oak tree on my college campus reading a political science textbook when [...]
How often have we not seen, even in our own lives, that actions we take to preserve something we cherish end up destroying that which we seek to protect? Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the desire for security and the yearning for justice are forever the final refuge of [...]