I was more than 2,500 miles from New York and Washington and nearly that far from Shanksville, Pa., 20 years ago today. My first awareness of the attacks came at about 7 a.m. I had gotten ready to leave for word when I turned on my computer to check my email on AOL (yes, the …
REALITY OF 9/11 TOOK 16 YEARS TO REALLY SINK IN FOR ME Read More »
“… let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia …” For all the fuss about the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Va., this week, the biggest of all the monuments to the Confederacy still stands, east of Atlanta in Stone Mountain Park. It’s a Confederate Mount Rushmore of sorts, carved …
LEE STATUE DOWN IN VIRGINIA, BUT STONE MOUNTAIN REMAINS Read More »
I suppose I shouldn’t be saying anything new about the 9/11 attacks if I don’t have anything new to say, but with Saturday the 20th anniversary, I can at least revisit what I wrote at the 10th anniversary and updated on the 15th. You see, we have become a country where few things really get …
20 YEARS AFTER 9/11 ATTACKS, THINGS KEEP GETTING WORSE Read More »
In 1952, a writer named Bernard Malamud came out with a great book about baseball. In 1984, with the Reagan ’80s at flood tide, Barry Levinson made a film of the book and ruined the story. Maybe it was the difference between eras, the difference between Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan, the difference between the …
Monday was Bob Newhart’s 92nd birthday, and someone suggested that he would be one of the four faces on a Mount Rushmore of great comedians. I can’t disagree with that, but I think it would be a nearly impossible task to pick four comedians without doing a tremendous injustice to at least half a dozen …
I saw a post on Facebook the other day that literally flabbergasted me. The post — by someone I don’t know all that well — was someone saying that in the last eight or nine years, he has had 97 different relatives, friends and business associates die. He was actually more specific than that. He …
Cal Ripken. Robin Yount. Chipper Jones. Ryan Zimmerman. And no, if I ask you what they all have in common, it’s not that none of them have ever been in Cliff Clavin’s kitchen. If you’re a baseball fan, you might realize that all four of these gentlemen — three of them retired, the fourth nearing …
The community in which I live — officially called an active adult community — doesn’t have all that many young people. When we moved here nearly 11 years ago, we were among the younger residents in Sun City Peachtree. We were 60, and it was a community for adults 55 and older. Now there are …
Nearly everyone with a decent education has heard the story of the person who went up to Benjamin Franklin after the constitutional convention and asked him what kind of government they were giving us. Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” I would love to see what Dr. Franklin would say about 21st …
REPUBLIC OR FASCISM, TEXAS HEADS DOWN WRONG ROAD Read More »
Long after Lyndon Johnson died, his biographers revealed that Johnson had known there was no way the U.S. could win in Vietnam. In fact, he reportedly knew there was nothing at all to be gained there. But during his five years and two months in the White House, he not only maintained our role in …
