Archive for Month: November 2024
The Seduction of Distraction
“We are detracted from distraction by distraction.” T.S. Eliot I was sitting on the porch reading with my grandson when he noticed that I had copied down the T.S. Eliot quote I had found in Paul Tillich’s classic book, The Courage to Be. He asked me what I had written, and I shared the quote with him. In a flash, he responded: “So if I’m playing a video game and Grammy asks me if Read More
Leadership Humility, Honesty, and Humor
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” Plato “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Hannah Arendt Wow. Those are two wildly divergent quotes. Hopefully, by the end of this post, they will both make sense. One could say Read More
Hanging onto Hope
Our twin grandchildren just celebrated their 13th birthday as thriving and loving young adults full of potential and promise. Passing this milestone made me think back to the first 105 days of their lives which were spent in the NICU. Each day we hung onto the hope that we might be able to celebrate who they would become one day. When they turned one, I wrote a poem entitled the Sun has Come Out describing Read More
Homeless Solutions and Models
How communities address homelessness issues provides a great example of what happens when you chase symptoms instead of change systems that are causing problems in the first place. Finding solutions to help people experiencing homelessness presents the same kinds of challenges communities face in dealing with health, criminal justice, poverty, inflation, immigration, climate change, gun violence, etc. The choice always involves investing in ways to improve the systems creating the problems vs. dealing with symptom Read More
Arcs of Life, History, and the Universe
Well, it’s not quite like being hit by a meteor that destroys the earth, but it’s pretty close to it. We just elected a cult leader who landed enough hateful and hegemonic messages to enough voters to win the electoral votes by 312-226. (Note: Trump’s margin was less than 2%, and he received less than 50% of the vote, llinois was the only blue state on the electoral map between the coasts, and the total Read More