Having no voice, or no voice that extends very far beyond the hedges at the boundaries of our private lives. That is the topic. But the question is whether we start there or end up there–whether through the shaping forces of the society or our own choices or a combination of the two. In a…

I wrote a note to our IN-2nd district House representative to the US Congress, Jackie Walorski (@RepWalorski), a couple of days ago, and an email reply came today. No doubt it’s a form letter. I asked about a recent press release on her official government website, where among other things she said that a 2.3%…

October 7 Testing, testing Just wondering. October 6 Remembering Eileen and Harvey Bender Remarks at a dedication ceremony on the IU South Bend campus, October 5, 2013. Planting a tree in autumn takes me back to Westover Greenhouses in St. Louis, where I worked when I was in college. Our customers knew that there were…

Living in South Bend as I do, I follow our IN-2nd Congressional district representative Jackie Walorski on Twitter — @RepWalorski — and I check out the press releases on her official Walorski.house.gov site from time to time. I know that she signed the August letter (top of page 3) urging House leaders to play hardball on…

One day he was in the middle of the eleventh year of nagging anxiety over not just a serious health issue but the fact of being “uninsurable” as far as his homeland was concerned. (I know a couple that moved to Central America two or three years ago to deal with a similar crisis.) The…

“When the noise gets louder than I can stand, I explain – as gently as I can – that my wife would likely still be alive if ACA had gone into effect even three months sooner.”

September 30 Civic literacy blog It’s nice to see that the Center for Civic Literacy at our cousin campus in Indy, the alarmingly named Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis or IUPUI, has a blog underway on civic literacy, a topic they phrase as a worthy question in an early posting: What exactly do American citizens need…

August 31 What Cicero knew He knew this: Who knows only his own generation remains always a child. Another way to put it: if we can’t be bothered to understand the words of others, whether they live now or lived in the past, then they are dead to us. In their words people try to…

July 31 Linkblog via scripts I see that if I run a section of outline outside the calendar area of Fargo and combine it with a script I cobbled together out of pieces from other people’s recently published scripts, I can set up a linkblog that runs from my named outline. Here is the script:…

June 30 Drowning in words and images In 1973, Pete Seeger seemed to predict the early 21st century, but he was just looking around his society when he wrote: “Americans are drowned in words. . . . We’re also drowned in pictures”. . .more information than we can use, more than we can make sense…