September 14, 2001 – Three days after terrorists hijacked two commercial airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Center Towers, felling them and killing nearly 3,000 people, the President of the United States made a visit to “Ground Zero.” He took a bullhorn in his hands and, as workers chanted, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” said, “I [...]
I’ve always loved the words to this song, but mostly the verses we don’t seem to sing, or take to heart. They are hopeful verses, filled with introspection and personal responsibility:
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with [...]
I read The Essential Gandhi by Louis Fischer a few months ago. But until a 10-day work trip to Africa and the Middle East, I didn’t have time to write down all the passages I had underlined. They are many. I had a hard time delineating his ideas into categories because they are so (not [...]
In a book I recently read (that I wish I had read 20 years ago), A Thomas Jefferson Education, the author speaks of national books. “A national book is something that almost everyone in the nation [note the use of “nation” rather than “country”] accepts as a central truth.” Each nation has its own books, [...]
I know this is an incredibly easy target, but I’m going to take a shot. With the recent publicizing of the CIA and White House memos regarding torture, part of the conversation has been whether torture works or doesn’t. Another aspect of the question has been whether it was legal or not. These shouldn’t even [...]