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“Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence, and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father.  I can’t let him destroy my country.”  Mary L. Trump “I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, and humiliation.  I know that’s not enough to change the world.  But to remain silent would have been an intolerable complicity.”  Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan writer One of my favorite songs is Read More

“These are the times that try men’s souls.”  Thomas Paine “The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative side than on the positive side . . . It has revealed to us much about human shortcomings, illnesses, and sins, but little about human potentialities, virtues, aspirations, or health.”  Abraham Maslow “We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community.  Our ambitions must be broad enough Read More

“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.”  Barack Obama “You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.”  Anton Chekhov   Here are the results of a 2023 Gallup Poll Survey on Institutional Trust.  The numbers represent the percentage of people in the United States who have a great deal Read More

“It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will.  It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.”  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah   “It is the consistency of the information that matters for Read More

My father and grandfather were both farmers for much of their lives.  They prepared the soil, planted the seeds, pulled the weeds, nurtured the plants, and harvested the produce that resulted from all that care and hard work.  I’m sure it must have been very satisfying for them to see the fruits of their labor.  They never longed for a life defined by titles, trophies, or treasures.  Their goal, as I want to imagine it, Read More

“A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together, but for most of our history it has encouraged the very process of information gathering, analysis, argument, and persuasion which allows us to make better, if not perfect, choices – not only about the means to our ends, but also the ends themselves.”  Barrack Obama, The Audacity of Hope:  Thoughts Read More

“Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women radiate, in their lives and their works. . . . . Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that Read More

In multiple surveys of presidential historians and biographers over the past 40 years, five presidents almost universally appear at the top of the “most effective leader” list:  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the Roosevelts.  While there is much less consensus around who else should be similarly recognized,  if it were up to me, I would add three more faces to Mount Rushmore:  FDR (consistently picked among the top 5) as well as JFK Read More

“Whatever you think rigor looks like, you should go up a few notches.”  Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Academy “Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.”  Dean Koontz, NYT best-selling author One of my favorite lines is “don’t believe what you think.”  We can have a lot of vigor for a particular idea or belief independent of the amount of rigor we invest to substantiate Read More

“Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy and serenity.” —Thich Nhat Hanh “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” —Marcus Aurelius Life is so easy.  There are only two required tasks – we have to breathe and we have to die.  In their hit  song, Dust in the Wind, the group Kansas sings “All your money won’t another minute buy.”  Read More

“Ideologies separate us.  Dreams and anguish bring us together.”  — Eugene Ionesco “The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.”  — Tom Robbins “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”—   Eleanor Roosevelt “For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.”  — Margaret Hefferman Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd.  Without innovation, it is a corpse.”  — Winston Churchill My Read More

I joined the Army in 1967 identifying as an IBMer and was honorably discharged in 1970 feeling more like an SDSer. (Student for a Democratic Society).  I interviewed for a job at IBM before I started basic training at Fort Knox in the hopes they would keep me in mind when I got out.  The Army told me they would send me to Monterrey, California for 6 months of German language training and then on Read More

Come gather ’round peopleWherever you roamAnd admit that the watersAround you have grownAnd accept it that soonYou’ll be drenched to the boneIf your time to you is worth savin’And you better start swimmin’Or you’ll sink like a stoneFor the times they are a-changin’ Bobby Dylan In 1988, I spent a couple of weeks investigating the health and safety infrastructure in China because my employer at the time, Northern Telecom, was working with the Government of Read More

“Confession of errors is like a broom which sweeps away the dirt and leaves the surface brighter and clearer.  I feel stronger for confession.”  Mahatma Gandhi In a recent Krista Tippett interview with Elaine Pagels, Krista asked Elaine what great books she had recently read.  One of them was A Confession by Tolstoy.  I immediately purchased it on Kindle for $.99.   It was the best buck I’ve spent in a long time.  As a relevant Read More

“When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.”  Victor Hugo   “A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.”  Fidel Castro   “Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.”  Alice Walker   Given all the disinformation proliferating in the world, it seems to me that we should be more concerned with convolution than revolution.  Are we living in the midst of the next Read More

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” Jimi Hendrix “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” Albert Einstein “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” Mahatma Gandhi “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” John F. Kennedy “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” Virginia Woolf “We can never obtain peace Read More

“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today.  No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.  This means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fiction way of thinking.”  Isaac Asimov “Man is something that shall be overcome.  Man is a rope, tied between beast Read More

“Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”  Oscar Wilde “It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.”  Yogi Berra “I believe that two people are connected at the heart, and it doesn’t matter what you do, or who you are or where you live; there are no boundaries or barriers if two people are destined to be together.”  Julia Roberts “A healthy social life is found Read More

“The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least try not to defy them.” Paul Hawken “When the soil disappears, the soul disappears.”  Ymber Delecto “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  R. Buckminster Fuller “What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a minor reflection of what we are doing Read More

“This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make.”  —Christopher Alexander “There is an immense, painful longing for a Read More

Dear Annie and Ezra, You are almost 11 years old now, and you are citizens of several communities:  your synagogue, your school, your teams, your town, your state, your country, and the world.  You have responsibilities to all of those communities. A citizen is someone who has rights and responsibilities in a defined group.  Those rights are at risk when we don’t act responsibly.  In your Jewish community, your responsibilities are to learn the Torah, Read More