Today is President’s Day and the pundits are engaged in a ranking of our nation’s presidents as if it were the ‘leader board’ in a PGA tournament. I think this illustrates our national compulsion with polls and pundits compiling endless opinions and assessments about almost everything. For better or for worse, our president is the person that can shape the direction and potentially the destiny of our nation and the world. It is a thankless and paradoxical job in many ways.
The last blog I wrote was in September 2016. I was challenging my modest readership to not get sucked into what was becoming the Trump Train and suggested that, like the Uncle Remus story about a ‘tar baby’, we were likely to become stuck in a pattern of ‘the-more-we-resist-the-more-embroiled-and-trapped-we-become’. In the year and a few months since, I suspended my blog-a-day habit and joined the army of the resigned, wringing our hands and bemoaning the apparent collapse of
Why is everyone so riveted to coverage of the presidential primary campaign – the most widely viewed reality TV show in history?
Its as though we’re all sitting in the world’s largest virtual coliseum witnessing a global gladiatorial contest bigger than the Super Bowl, being fought by real people with real weapons (mostly money) with real life or death consequences. To make it more interesting, the consequences are not simply for the combatants, but for the audience as well — consequences
It’s now the time of year when everyone seems to be doing recaps of what happened in 2015 and making resolutions or predictions for 2016. I usually like these efforts and look forward to being reminded of all that has occurred and the speculations of what lay ahead. This year, however, is different. Our challenge and my message is that if we’re going to have next year be better than this one, we need to get beyond thinking in terms of a ‘good year’ or a ‘bad year’ and
How we approach change and how we personally relate to issues can make all the difference between whether we get upset and fight to defend the status quo and our values or whether we listen and consider that maybe we can have our cake and eat it too! Like most progressives, when presented with hard-line conservative positions, I just shake my head and become resigned. Gun control is one of those issues. I simply cannot understand how unrestricted and laissez-faire attitudes toward guns make
Almost everyone I know who has traveled to or lived in the developing world have stories about their experience being close to levels of poverty most of us cannot imagine. When asked how they dealt with it, most said they were only able to confront it by “disconnecting” — going into a kind of blind zone where they “tune out” the death and suffering. Indeed, how do most of us deal with statistics such as a more than a billion people live on less than $2.50 a day
No. This is not a discussion about his or anyone’s sexual orientation. This about living heterogeneous or homogeneous lives and whether there is any room in the political arena for generous listening and respect for someone else’s point of view. This is an inquiry into how we think about life and the world and the current state of our Uncivil society.
A couple of years ago I wrote a blog called “Free Speech: Who’s Listening” in which I pointed to the fact that
Jim Selman talks with award winning producer Barnet Bain about Bain’s new book: The Book of Doing and Being”.
In Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories, Br’er Fox strikes out when his plan to catch Br’er Rabbit using the “Tar-Baby” backfires. Instead, the “clever” fox traps himself in what he’d created to the point of being totally stuck in a situation from which he cannot free himself, preventing any move that doesn’t worsen the situation. This seems to me an apt metaphor for what’s playing out in the Republican Primary race and America’s
In my blog “Middle Class Meltdown” earlier this month, I suggested that more and more Americans are creating their own jobs by making offers.
Essentially, I was suggesting that more and more of us are stepping up to the fact that at the end of the day, each of us is solely responsible for our livelihood and we succeed by adding value in whatever ways we can. We contribute value and value is rewarded. What is less obvious is that our value is a function of what others value, not
