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What If … Just Sayin’
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself” — Leviticus 19:18 (Hebrew scripture) “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” — Jesus in Matthew 7:12 (Christian scripture) Apparently, some group…
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Where Has All The Housing Gone?
Though this piece is coming out now, due to some particular circumstances, I have been contemplating talking about it for quite some time. In other words, the problem’s been around for a long time — solutions not so much. Here in Massachusetts, where I work, it is a brisk 21 degrees. When I arrived, it…
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Seriously? Absurdity R Us…
I have been ranting about income disparity for years. (I encourage my denomination, the United Church of Christ, to have a conversation about poverty and economics, By the way). I have believed, since I was a teen, that the system is rigged and the “American Dream” of work hard ==> getting ahead wasn’t valid, as…
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All I Want For Some Christmas Is A New Deering
This Piece Has Been Coming For A Long Time… I have spoken of Deering frequently in these pages — mostly about people who have gone there, been touched by the place, led there, been to either reunion, and/or are leading in their communities now. I treasure those people and that place — and this year, I…
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A New Tack: What DOES Government Do?
I hate it when friends fight. A day or two ago, I posted on Facebook something about Obamacare and the insurance companies response to it. People are still fighting about it. I go online and I play a game and the chat section of it has people arguing about Obamacare. Really? Aliens, bad guys, superheroes,…
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We Have Failed Our Children
I just saw two brothers in my office this evening who had — between them, in a week — pushed a kid, accidentally slammed a kid’s hand in a locker, “jokingly” strangled a kid who was 3 years younger than him, and (seeing nothing wrong with it) twisted a male peer’s nipple, in a thing…
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On Civil Discourse
My friends Sean and Bob and I got into it yesterday about politics on my blog. In the end, I felt battered and exhausted, and I don’t think that was, necessarily, anybody’s goal. I have to think there’s a better way to do things, but I don’t know if anyone remembers what that is or…
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How To Fix This Debt Ceiling/ Shutdown Thing
I have already begun to see petitions for having people arrested for sedition after this latest shutdown. This is one way of handling this last crisis, but I’m done with verbal war. On the other side, there are those who will feel resigned to “this is the way it is” and remain hopeless. I’m sick…
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An Ethic of Life.
I was listening to NPR this morning on the way to the train and there was a long piece about the Syrian government possibly using Sarin gas on its opposition and there being video of it. The other day, in this country, “an Australian baseball player out for a jog in an Oklahoma neighborhood was…
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I Don’t Care What You Think, People Are Hungry (Poor, Hurt, In Trouble…)
Once again, I was reading the Huffington Post, and once again, some bigot in government said that people who use welfare or food stamps or some program or other are “freeloaders”. I have moved past the point of caring whether he or she thinks nothing bad ever happens to anybody. It does. People lose their…