July 7, 2020
This is a thing. It is really a thing. recently heard a man talking about how white people are putting signs up in their yards that are nothing but virtue signaling. Virtue signaling? That intrigued me. According to a web site called Simplicable, virtue signaling "is the conspicuous communication of moral values and good deeds, believed to be motivated by a desire for social status and self-satisfaction." Wow. And, all this signaling apparently comes in various forms...
June 22, 2020
Most of my friends are still very worried about COVID 19. I admit…I am not. I am so over it that I can hardly see it in my rearview mirror anymore. So much has happened that is more concerning to me. More shootings here. More first responders leaving their jobs. And still and forever, the dark cloud of the George Floyd murder and the plunder that followed...
June 8, 2020
Is there a need for anything else to be said about George Floyd's public humiliation and murder? Frankly, I've been stunned into silence--a rarity for me. But I ask myself: Can anything I say matter now? Maybe not. We can't change what happened, but maybe we can join the mourners across the country who feel powerless but want to take some kind of stand…want to go on the record with all those who have been damaged by the actions of a bad cop. I read an editorial about Floyd's murder by my friend Oseye Boyd, editor of the Indianapolis Recorder. She wrote about how personally hurt she was by the disregard for human dignity and cruelty surrounding Floyd's death. Her soul was wounded...
May 21, 2020
Have you ever noticed that the word "silent" has the same letters as the word "listen?"I have a friend who never says much. She waits to see what other people think on any given subject before she expresses an opinion--or says nothing. I think she loves the safety of keeping her own counsel and undoubtedly doesn't want to alienate anyone. She is an occasional visitor to a coffee shop group I attend a couple of times a week at which the news of the day is often discussed, and when she is there, she is primarily a listener. We are not alike...
May 7, 2020
When an opinion columnist at the New York Times asked readers to share the status of their mental health with him in April, a few weeks into quarantine, he received more than 5,000 replies. While many said they were "hanging in there," the rest of the responses were more like a "river of woe and agony." All over the country, people who were at first happy to have a break in their busy lives, angling for bulk toilet paper online, are by this time frustrated, bored, and lonely...
April 21, 2020
So, here we are in the midst of a "quarantine," the latin root word of which is "forty." Why is forty so important? Mentioned 146 times in Scripture, the number 40 generally heralds a period of testing and transformation. For example, the flood was caused by a rain that fell for 40 days and 40 nights and Moses spent 40 days on Mount Sinai when he was given the 10 Commandments. When Moses sent men to scout the land of Canaan, they were gone for 40 days. In Judges 3, "The land had rest for 40 years" after many years of war. The Israelites spent 40 years in the desert before they took the promised land and...
April 6, 2020
I do about three miles a couple of times a week walking on the Monon Trail and happened by this goose standing on top of one of the old cottages on Cornell Avenue. All the other geese are in pairs, honking and letting everyone know they are claiming nesting areas, but this guy is abiding by our current social distancing regulations and he looks like many of us who are feeling a little lonely...
March 23, 2020
I was at Kroger yesterday. Shelves were bare. People were racing around. There was a line 90 feet long for the two check-out counters they had open and a dozen self-checkout stations with lines of their own. Pandemic Panic has set in. In the line one woman was telling me she had no spleen (?), another was asking me how I could be calm…"watch the news!" she demanded. (As if I hadn't been watching the 24/7 coverage of COVID-19.)
March 9, 2020
Rudy Rasmus pastors a church he started in the 90s with 9 members. Today he ministers with his wife to 9,000 souls just outside Houston, TX. But last Sunday he spoke in Indianapolis and began his message by telling us about the day he was planning to end his life. It was August 14th in 2017, and he was overwhelmed by a belief that his life no longer had meaning. He called the therapist he'd been seeing for many years who listened to his crushing feelings of hopelessness, paused for a moment and quietly said, "Rudy, you've been running from failure your entire life, maybe you should consider a perspective change. Instead of looking behind you, why don't you start looking ahead?"
February 24, 2020
Taxpayers pay millions to keep lawbreakers off the street, yet when the courts decide these folks are ready to be released, they often find themselves in situations that tend to send them right back behind bars. Recidivism serves no one, and while repeat criminals must be incarcerated, too many go back to prison due to technical violations not crimes. In the picture, left, Lena Hackett, CEO of Community Solutions is explaining a graph that breaks down into percentages those who returned to jail or prison for various reasons. The smaller blue portions of the bars represent the recidivism percentage of those who committed a new crime and were reincarcerated. But that much larger gold portion represents those who are returned to prison because they have violated technicalities of their release as set out by a judge...
