Monthly Archives: August 2009

I am radical because I have dared to take seriously the moral posture of the lives of these two great men. I am conservative because in taking seriously their lives, I see that I am capable of exercising considerable responsibility notwithstanding the ups-and-downs of my life; and I choose to live accordingly. And if the point of using the word “nigga” was to be transformative in some way by undermining the racist connotations of the word “nigger”, then the life that I live is an embodiment of the transformation intended, the reality things to the contrary notwithstanding. Continue reading →

Here is an example of compassion. I take the money that I was planning on spending for a marvelous and much anticipated vacation in Cape Town (South Africa) and give it to the family members who have just lost their … Continue reading →

If in the name of freedom of speech, we should lack the self-discipline to refrain from engaging in anonymous viciousness, then democracy as we know it shall cease to exist. Either the universal affirmation of our equality shall cease to exist or the freedom of speech that makes democracy such a mellifluous ideal of excellence shall cease to exist. In either case, our humanity shall be diminished. Continue reading →

If between any two people, their texting one another is the larger part of the basis of their knowing one another, then what we have is a friendship that is shorn of those spontaneous personal moments that necessarily confirm and affirm the trust and goodwill and affection between them. As I noted above, anyone can put a bunch of exclamation marks and smiley-faces after a sentence. I do not have to think much of a person in order to that. It suffices that I know that this is the sort of thing that one does. Friendship at its best is about shared moments to which no smiley-face or exclamation point could ever do justice. Insofar as we are losing sight of this truth owing to technology, then a most disturbing reality is that technology is chipping away at our humanity. Continue reading →

The smile is a very simple piece of behavior that is universal and which often makes all the difference in the world in the way in which human interaction unfolds and for which no words, no matter how eloquent, can ever substitute? Yet, at first blush, it looks for all the world as if human beings could get along perfectly well without, of all things, the wherewithal to smile. Notice, though, that we human beings would have to be very different creatures indeed if all that we lacked turned out to be none other than the physical wherewithal to smile. If that does not make the smile majestic, then I cannot begin to fathom what does. Continue reading →

Give me a world in which people no longer think in a reasonable matter and a President of the United States who seems more than a little too willing to play the race card rather than the justice card, then what one has is ever so fertile soil for considerable political unrest. And history shows that considerable political unrest makes for very fertile soil for civil war. Continue reading →

Trina Thompson deserves something akin to the Darwin award for her lawsuit against Monroe College.  It really is not possible that she has it all together mentally.  The first sign of this is her thought that a mere 2.7 grade … Continue reading →

Countless are the differences between Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama.  Hitler was the paradigm of evil.  Nothing of the sort holds for Obama.  Alas, there are also some striking similarities between the two.  These similarities do not make Obama evil.  … Continue reading →

Strikingly, many people who claim to have been a victim of injustice owing to the group to which they belong seem to think that it is quite all right to commit wrongs against individuals belonging to the group in question.  … Continue reading →