In every family, including my own, there are those struggling with anger, dissociation, and fragmentation that at the least tear the family apart and, at worst, erupt into violent acts like the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, allegedly committed by their son. This sort of tragedy is played out many times a day […]
Early in my life I became aware of the cowardly act of “shunning”. I lived with my Quaker Grandparents in Swarthmore Pa. for 5 years as my father was deployed to Korea and Japan during the Korean War. My mother worked at the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia, so my grandmother became my surrogate mother. Most […]
Several years ago, my father, my brother, and I were camped along a small stream in the middle of Utah, near the town of Moab. Not far from us another family was camped. The family was a mother, a father, and a pre-teen boy. One evening about dusk the boy must have done something dreadful […]
We have a culture that subordinates families and marriage. We have government policies that subsidize and exploit single woman raising their children without a father. The working class that capitalism helped raise from the bondage of grinding poverty over the past 200 years and the upward mobility that capitalism created was dependent on the structure […]
I was a scout team player on the 1969 Wittenberg Tiger football team. That team won the first NCAA National Championship Football game ever played. Though it was a division 3 team we had some very Big Time Players that could have played anywhere in the country. One of them was Wes Bates the founder […]
One of my favorite low-brow comedies is the movie “Airplane.” Barbara Billingsley, better known to us Boomers as June Cleaver, the Beave’s mom, answers the call to serve as a translator when an African American passenger from Harlem has a medical emergency. It is absolutely hilarious. But what makes it so funny is the kernel […]
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I first read those words 46 years ago. Arguably the opening sentence in Leo Tolstoy’s ANNA KARENINA is one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature. Before I ever thought of becoming a husband, a father, or a […]
Two years ago, I approached a “Conservative Think Tank” in Idaho about developing a strategy and then tactics to make a plan that would focus political issues in such a way to encourage people who are not usually involved in politics to become engaged in the process. Many new people coming into our state have […]
Men are being marginalized in our country today. Not just white men, but Black men and Latino men, and Oriental men. All men. Things that men do hunting, fishing, playing sports—especially contact sports, are being attacked by the media and liberal progressive groups across the country. My idea of what it means to be a […]