These pieces were not written by the late British poet, Ken Smith (1938-2003), nor the other Ken Smiths who make bass guitars, study marine biology, sell cars, teach card counting, paint war scenes in oils, guide bear hunters in Idaho, teach forest management, study immunology, do war reporting, sell real estate, photograph nature, teach cryptology, provide legal counsel to the gay and lesbian community, realign the spines of athletes, listen for seismic faults in the Sierra Nevadas, operate a 4-axis milling machine, work for sustainable development in Alberta, play blackjack, or criticize Junk English. Nor were the pieces written by the Ken Smith who is “the Elvis Costello of Landscape Architecture” nor the one who serves in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives nor the one who hit a home run for the Atlanta Braves in 1983. I only wish.
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Why so alienated?
Here's a hunch: If we don't understand the nature of alienation, and its causes, we don't understand much of what happens around us in this troubled time in the United States. And if we don't understand those things, we surely don't have a good shot at understanding healing. And that would seem to leave us…
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Death panels vs. death squads
Below is a note I wrote about access to health care in 2017, early in the first Trump term in office. Rereading it today, my thought is this: If journalism today is a broken-down ghost of its old self, and if activism is still finding its footing, then inside-the-beltway activities of the party in power…
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Episode 1. A Private Club
A very short poem about learning to spot trouble, based on clues from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and written the day after seeing the film in a movie theater decades ago. “A Private Club” is only four lines long.
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One value at a time
If all you can hold in your billionaire head is one value at a time, then maybe you clutch onto an idea that you’re calling free speech, say. Speech is good, free speech is better. The freer the speech, the more of it, the better. Flood the zone with free speech. But a lowly millionaire might…
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Real people suffer
My Facebook posting today. Usually, not always, I shy away from mentioning politics on Facebook. Please tune out, if you prefer. Over on Fox, which is generally the friendly chat platform for politicians who use the pro-life slogan, they’re starting to talk about ending the social distancing very soon, and as they say, likely letting…
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Jury duty
The twelve of us got off to a good start. We discovered some points of common ground – for one thing, we joked about wishing we weren’t on the jury. We also shared the goal of completing the task, and we were all relieved to discover the case was brief and didn’t provide very many…
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Called to the front
In the years immediately after World War II, a young man named Gordon Henderson wrote an unpublished novel based on his experience serving in the 82nd Airborne Division from the late summer of 1944 to the end of the war. A member of his family has told me that the novel runs closely parallel to…
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Death panels vs. death squads
Death squads work under cover of darkness, kidnapping and killing, robbing people of their lives and inspiring terror among the people. Death panels have official sanction to take and ruin lives. They meet in government buildings with Orwellian agendas posted at the door. I had thought that the Senate committee crafting the new health care…
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Truth driven underground, voices rise up
Society drives a portion of the truth about itself underground, and people create an alternate pathway for that truth as best they can. Both of those ideas are worth studying. How does a society like ours silence and drown out voices, stories, facts, understandings, truths? And how do people find a work-around, and with what…
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The silence of the citizen
A little theory about the weakness of our democracy. Silence is the basic mode of a citizen, largely unallied with others, having no regular civic audience, skilled in no form of public address, possessing no reliable stream of information or one so contested and poisoned and vexed as to be more problem than aid, susceptible…