“Old man take a look at my life.” Aged, 77-year-old rebel Neil Young goes full-on church lady, gets the vapors about a new young troublemaker, and demands the punk be fired. Or he’ll take his classic cookies and go home. Spotify says “don’t let the doorknob hit ya.” Across the room, ole Miz Joni Mitchell creaks up out of her ortho pillow, puts down her Geritol spritzer and warbles “me too-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo.” (“Sometimes it’s a thin line between Joni and…
Live not by lies. Soviet writer Alexandr Solzenitsyn’s great clarion call shook the re-Stalinized USSR of Leonid Brezhnev to its foundation. Before there was Vlacav Havel and Lech Walesa, there was Solzenitsyn. A man who’d actually survived Stalin’s death camps and had written the internationally acclaimed “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” narrative of prison camp life, Solzenitsyn was one of several dissidents who defied the all-powerful Soviet tyranny. At that point unable to simply ‘disappear’…
The great 20th Century writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn proved to be a great moral voice that helped bring down the Communist tyranny of the USSR. His ‘Gulag Archipelago’ chronicled the vast murder-camp system of the Soviet Union and stripped away they bloody regime’s moral legitimacy. His great short essay “Live Not By Lies” was both a moral call to arms and a practical how-to guide to living justly in an unjust society. It’s just as applicable today as it was when…
Congratulations! You got robbed last week. And the week before. All last year! How much? Well, it depends where you live, but basically, you took a 7% pay cut last year. How so? Well, the US inflation rate for last year was about 7%. https://www.wsj.com/articles/us-inflation-consumer-price-index-december-2021-11641940760 Every dollar you made was worth 7% less than the year before. Every single dollar you’ve saved is now 93 cents. Someone snuck into your house and your bank and your savings and…
“Insurrection” eh? Strong word. The events of the Capitol Building attack—and it was indeed attacked—on January 6, 2021 are in the news and rightly so. Vice President Kamala Harris likened the attack to Pearl Harbor and September 11. “Certain dates echo throughout history,” Harris said. “When our democracy came under assault. Dates that occupy not only a place on our calendar but a place in our collective memory. Dec. 7, 1941, Sept. 11, 2001, and Jan. 6, 2021.” https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-fbi-finds-scant-evidence-us-capitol-attack-was-coordinated-sources-2021-08-20/…
“The New Maps Are Here!” Like the Steve Martin line “the new phone books are here!” everybody’s checking out the next ten year’s political landscape. This year in Michigan, the redrawn voting district maps forecast a very bumpy ride, much like Martin’s in The Jerk. From the County level to the state, the lines have been radically redrawn, and the political world has been put through a blender. By whom and to what end? At the state and Congressional level…
Politicians are generally regarded as a suspect breed, and rightly so. Our Michigan legislature can seem a never-ending sitcom of “Lawmakers Behaving Badly.” But when a lawmaker behaves with quiet courage, calm dignity, and a ferocious devotion to duty, it barely gets a mention. That’s why we need to take a minute and talk about Andrea Schroeder. State Representative Andrea Schroeder died October 27th, this year. The cause was stomach cancer. She was 57 years old, married, mother…