This past week my housemate and I took off with two dogs for the Oregon coast for a three-day celebration of my ninetieth birthday. We’d done the same thing in June for my housemate’s eightieth. As we waited for the ferry, my housemate fell. Shaken up and bruised but okay, we continued. We took […]
Archive | Musings
What Has Happened to Us?
I’ve just finished reading Imperfect Heart: a Journal, a Book club, and a Global Pandemic, a good writer friend’s* as yet unpublished chronical of the Covid pandemic. A blend of non-fiction and fiction, the book opens in April 2020 at the start of the pandemic, leads up to the January 6th attempted coup, and ends […]
Testing the Strength of Our Democracy
Today, I’ve been watching the arrest of Donald Trump. For half of the nation it marks the strength of the system in bringing a criminal and dangerous leader to justice. For the other half, it is a major miscarriage of justice, a victory for a system turned criminal. The latter half cried for protest, but […]
Lessons From the Debt Limit Victory
The ease with which President Biden and House Speaker Kenneth McCarthy reached a deal on the debt limit and the speed with which it passed through both houses of Congress gives us a rare view of democracy as it should work. Ross Douthart, in today’s New York Times (June 6, 2023) credits this success […]
Biden and the Democrats
Biden has declared his candidacy for President. I find that event both reassuring and sad. It’s reassuring because it acknowledges that he is the only available candidate who can beat Trump. It’s sad because Democrats remain tepid toward the President, conceding unenthusiastically that he is the candidate with the best chance of winning, but […]
Hyper-Individualism in the University
If you want to discover the values of an institution, ask what it rewards. In the university, tenure is the reward, and it’s earned by publication of research. The order of names on a piece is of vital importance. Individual accomplishment, therefore, is prized over teaching, administrative service or any other community activity. […]
The University in a Polarized Nation
Law students at Stanford University have been shouting down professors and other students, and the scene apparently has been repeated at other top-rated law schools around the country. That the uncivil behavior of polarization has reached universities does not come as a surprise, but it is, nevertheless, upsetting. I grew up in the […]
The Cause of It All
Anyone you talk to will be happy to tell you the root cause of today’s social, economic and political ills, and I’ve certainly done my share of that. However, I’ve spent most of my time pointing at the liberal’s contribution to these upheavals. It’s time to turn to the other side of the coin—the hyper-individualism […]
Education in America
The current crises in over racial education in primary school leave me without a response. The voices I hear speak the language of extremism on both sides, are irreconcilable, so will lead to nothing but name-calling. I think back on my own racial education; I don’t remember not knowing that the nation has always […]
Sanitizing the Language
Readers should be warned that the following is written by a deaf-old-woman-writer who loves the language in all its dimensions. I’ve lived long enough to remember previous efforts to change attitudes by manipulating the language, and I urge political correctness proponents to look more carefully at the consequences of those previous attempts. I understand the […]
Goodbye Bridget
Our sixteen-year-old basenji, Bridget, died in her sleep last week, an event that fills us with both sadness and relief. Blind for the last three or four years, increasingly senile, with a sensitive stomach to boot, she took a lot of patience and a lot of care. She was the sixth of eleven […]
The Two-faced Power of Place
I’m realizing, as I cope with age and its disabilities, that a good part of the fear of growing old is loss of place—of being a part of something larger than myself—and the importance this plays in our identity. For many, especially women of my age, family remains the primary group, and in […]
