Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.Carl Jung

September 2011

  • The Decency To Doubt

    Whether it’s Texas governor Rich Perry admitting he has no doubt about the guilt of those who have been executed, or the reaction of those who were against some kind of reprieve to the recent execution of Troy Davis in Georgia, or anyone else who is sure of guilt in a capital offense, I pause at the certitude these individuals display. Can there be such certitude? Wouldn’t it be rare, or rarer than we are accustomed to thinking? Can we execute anyone with the certainty we are doing the right thing? We can rationalize there is no room for doubt, we can find reasons, but are those reasons themselves rational or are they the product of us wanting to prove ourselves right? The same night Troy Davis was put to death, Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed in Texas. He was a white supremacist who drove the truck while a black man was being dragged to his death. Perhaps some deserve to die, if so does that absolve us—at least of the decency to doubt we are doing the right thing?

  • Thank You Jackie

    It’s not what Jackie Kennedy said about Martin Luther King Jr. or about Lyndon Johnson that stands out for me in those recently released taped conversations. What stands out is how far she came, how much she grew, how she matured and evolved. She was 34 when she gave those interviews at a time when women’s liberation was only words particularly for someone of a generation schooled in what was to become passé attitudes. I am not the same person I was at age 34. Many whom I respect, who have grown, matured and evolved aren’t either because experience and knowledge changes our perceptions and attitudes. Jacqueline Kennedy went on to be a professional woman, an accomplished person, someone who earned the respect of many not because of what gave her fame, but because of who she became. Her conversations on those tapes become the punctuation helping us to better grasp the span of her achievement as a human being, and make her into a shining example—not of Camelot, but of the kind of growth we ought to aspire to.

  • Outside The Crux

    Within an hour today I had read about human trafficking, the problems of refugee camps for Somalians, those of Mongolia, where the cold as well as changing times force people with no skills to move to the city and one family of 6 in Ulan Bator lived in something the author called “a crawl space” considering themselves lucky because some in the new slums there were worse off. I also read that 15% of the world’s population has a disability, anything from blindness or loss of limb to chronic aliments, and saw a picture of a railway station in North Korea, where the locomotive was so old, so rusty, that in western countries it would have long been relegated to the junk heap. By the time I received an email that a young neighbor had to move out and find a cheaper apartment because her wealthy parents had had a reversal and were no longer able to finance her graduate studies, my reaction was rather muted. Her circumstances speak of difficulties and even sacrifice but in context of the millions I’d been reading about, and the millions I’ve read about on other days, she seemed fortunate to be outside the crux of human suffering. And of course so am I.

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