Polemics rather than musings. Nothing neutral. Dark and not for everyone. Progressive in politics, atheistic in religious/spiritual matters, relativistic in ethics and metaphysics. Essays, poems, and an occasional story.
I know this is dumb. It’s hopeless. Maybe it’s even babyish. That’s why I’m just putting it down in this blue notebook and keeping it to myself. I might tell Carla some of it, or even read her parts. But not Rachel. She’s only nine, and she was only seven when it happened.
A former executive editor of The Washington Post and current journalism professor wrote a guest essay for the Post addressing evolving opinions in journalism as to the proper role of “objectivity” in reporting and editing news.
There is a tendency to cast general social and political issues, shared universally in all times and places, in single-culture terms. Maybe it’s an attempt to make them “more relevant” to the readership in a single culture. But it results in a parochialism, an overemphasis of one culture’s manifestation of what is better understood as a universal human condition.
He’d have said that we’re beholden
Not to leave things unexplored,
Said there’s always something lurking
Underhanded, untoward.
She saw life as long parade
Of tawdriest taste and kind.
She thought that made her renegade;
I wasn’t so inclined.
There’s no cause for hesitation
In embracing affectation.
We say we act, that we behave,
But truer said is we are slave
To act and to behave such that
We seem to wear the cloak and hat
That we think others want to see.
No one’s suited to conduct,
Since no one writes the symphony.
No leading light stands to instruct,
So we all play on whimsically.
Yesterday will not suffice
To justify the new day’s life.
Laurels can’t be rested on,
But prickle to be bested on.
The date itself, though inauspicious,
Hadn’t stuck me as suspicious.
The note invited all to come
That date to the inviter’s home,
Where we’d all “propitiate,
And, mood allowing, celebrate.”
There’s precious little I can do
To recreate the world for you,
And just as little you’ll revise
The world I picture through my eyes.
Much written about “faith” has an implicit or explicit sneering and dismissive quality, heavy with an attitude of “What kind of limited person believes this stuff?” This piece may be viewed that way by some, but the intention is to identify how and why the Christian religion is often construed and used in a socially detrimental and “un-Christian” way.