Campus Unrest I feel like I am reliving my youth. During high school in Rome in 1968-1970, I watched the United States wrack itself from afar over the issue of the Vietnam War. I watched students get shot at Kent State and radical blacks take over the Willard Straight Hall student union at Cornell, the closest thing I had to a family school, as the place where my mother had attended. The similarity of those…
Vax Redux Last fall Kim and I were very diligent about getting all vaccinations that were being advised for people of our age by the CDC. We had the latest COVID booster. We had our regular annual flu vaccination. We got the pneumonia vaccination. We also got the RSV vaccination so that we wouldn’t catch one of those nasty deep lung infections. They checked the status of our shingles vaccinations, but we had gotten that…
The Abortion of Humanity I have long considered abortion to be one of the thorniest policy issues in American politics. It strikes me as one of those issues that galvanizes people to the extreme and yet one that can be debated on grounds of morality ad infinitum. Ignoring the politics of the moment, the dimensions of the issue involve gender equality, primordial imperative of procreation, libertarianism, privacy, cultural norms about sex, the balancing of individual…
YOLO It seemed more than coincidental that the first story on today’s New York Times The Morning is an article on the universally prevalent thought process involved in people’s ongoing wrestling match with time and how to use this, their most precious resource. They mentioned the term YOLO in that article and I have to admit that I had to look it up. You Only Live Once is yet another version of my favorite tag…
This is America This morning, as I prepare to spend the day going into the airport zone, my suspended animation state I adopt when traveling, I am affronted by two things I see on the news. The first is the back and forth that took place yesterday in the Supreme Court over the issue of presidential immunity in the case of Donald Trump v. The United States of America. While I still have a good…
It’s Happening… I am sitting in Eastern Tennessee in the heart of what surely is red America. We are wrapping up our trip here to Tennessee and the Deep South with some Smoky Mountain touring. We will go up on an aerial tramway to a wild animal sanctuary in Gatlinsburg and then come back here to Pidgeon Forge to end our visit with the Dollywood Stampede, whatever that is. It’s been an unusual and fun…
Dollywood Nocturne Today we are scheduled to spend the day at the Smoky Mountain version of Disneyland. The theme park was created in 1986 under the banner of the region’s highly popular country singer and performer, Dolly Parton. She is co-owner of the park, which is located in a place called Pidgeon Fork, Tennessee. We are heading up from Chattanooga in order to be at the front gates at the 10am opening time. The park…
The Buc-ee’s Choo Choo Today is our Alabama day. I’m going to take a wild guess that northern Alabama is not so very different than northern Mississippi. I’ll bet the residents of those two places might vehemently disagree, especially at a college football game between the two states, but to a southern neophyte like me, it all looks green, verdant and rural. We will further test that theory today as we drive from Tupelo. Mississippi,…
A Trace of Grits We started out down the Natchez Trace today. The first job was figuring out where the name Trace comes from. As I should have guessed, it seems to be a combination of the definitions to copy and to follow in the path of. It seems this trail was originally one of the old animal trails that were likely created to get deer and other animals to and from the nearest salt…
The Land of Elvis Every once in a while an entertainer comes along that captures the imagination of the nation and ascends into immortality. In this generation that honor seems to belong to Taylor Swift, but in my generation no one ever got bigger than Elvis Presley. He represented and transcended the decades of the 50s, 60s, and 70s all at once. Very few of us that came of age in those years could deny…