One of my guilty pleasures in the mid 1980s was a movie called “St. Elmo’s Fire,” a Brat Pack effort about seven friends fresh out of college trying to get started on their road to success. Andrew McCarthy plays a young journalist who dreams of someday writing about The Meaning of Life. He has a …
When my wife Nicole and I moved to Georgia in the autumn of 2010, there was one sight I wanted to see. Our home just north of Griffin is just 57 miles from Moreland, a town of just 382 people. The one resident I knew of had moved away more than 40 years earlier and …
IT’S BEEN 29 YEARS, AND I MISS LEWIS GRIZZARD’S WRITING Read More »
Jimmy Carter was the first winning presidential candidate ever to get my vote. I was 26 in 1976, but I had only voted in one presidential election before that. I couldn’t vote in 1968 even though I was 18, but the voting age wasn’t lowered from 21 until a year after that election. So my …
PRESIDENT CARTER NEARING HIS PERSONAL FINISH LINE Read More »
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose …” I can’t help wondering what the men who founded our country would think of their handiwork nearly two and a half centuries later. What were the freedoms that mattered the most to these men of the late 18th century and how do they compare to …
Are you old enough to remember 1965? Some people have called it the year everything changed. Historian James T. Patterson wrote a wonderful book called “The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America” in which he called ’65 the beginning of the era we know as the Sixties really began. It was the summer of …
What’s the biggest problem facing American families that they can actually do something to solve? It isn’t who uses what bathroom. It isn’t whether Heather has two mommies. It isn’t even the ever-growing difference between the extremely wealthy and average working people, except possibly peripherally. Nope. It isn’t anything that will draw an “I told …
NOTHING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN LITERACY FOR KIDS Read More »
Does anyone outside of fans of the two competing teams still watch the Super Bowl for the football? If you’re old enough to remember back to the beginning, the games were crummy and the halftime shows were worse. The first game wasn’t even sold out. Green Bay pounded Kansas City and the halftime show was …
The first news I heard of the massive earthquake that hit Syria and Turkey the other day, the word was that there were at least 1,600 dead. Then it seemed like every time I heard mention of the 7.8 temblor and its toll, the number got larger and larger. By this morning, the word was …
Are Americans the most gullible people in the world? Any reasonable study of the facts would put us at or near the top of any list. I’m going to throw out a few statements to consider and then look at them one by one. “America is the freest nation on earth.” “America is not a …
There’s an old expression, slightly on the vulgar side, that describes someone whose elevator doesn’t go to the top floor. “He’s crazier than a shithouse mouse.” If you have to think about that one a little, it’s basically describing someone or something that has been driven around the bend by the condition of his or …
