The world is filled with dictators, despots and strong men. The world has pretty much always been filled with dictators, despots and strong men. I hate to say it, but I can find no reason not to expect that it will always be so. My entire life has intersected with these strong men, beginning with my earliest years growing up in Venezuela. My mother was a development officer at the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela from…
I feel like I am less inclined these days to write about politics, but that may or may not be true if you tally my stories about politics versus those about everything else. What I do sense is that I want to hold back and not just repeat my shock and awe over every new challenge put forth by the Trump team. I feel like I’m happy to let the system and others more activist…
Yesterday while Kim was going in and out of the front door with some holiday decorations, there was a sudden thump sound and she unexpectedly swore audibly. I did the usual, “Everything OK?” lazy man outreach from my chair across the room. When she said, “This thing fell down”, I had no idea what she was talking about so I decided I probably needed to get up to investigate. What had happened was that the…
Like so many of us in this moment, I am still struggling to make sense of the world in this new configuration. For instance, we spent the last two years and more, watching all the literal trials and tribulations around the indictments and even a few convictions of Donald Trump, the man who is the president-elect of the greatest nation on the face of the earth, the one that has the largest economy and represents…
I don’t think the world operates on a web of conspiracies the way some people do. I feel like the exact opposite is the case. I believe people are trying their hardest these days to make sense of everything that’s happening when the truth of the matter is most likely that there is minimal rhyme or reason to most of it. One of my favorite themes revolves around the fact that we live in an…
Every day is a new adventure. The great Chinese curse says “may you live in interesting times“. These times are nothing if not interesting. In 2017, as Donald Trump took the reins of government in his first presidency, we were all unhappy or surprised by many of his choices for senior cabinet positions, Bringing Rex Tillerson in as Secretary of State made us all wonder what was going on. Jeff Sessions as Attorney General was…
I believe that it will take a while to figure out the new normal when it comes to life in these United States. Last Wednesday was stage one of the cycles of grief. We were all in some form of denial. But then, in the next few days we have all mostly gone through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance all in a jumbled mass of emotions. Actually, I feel like denial was really more…
When things go sideways, its important to step back and keep things in perspective. I suspect this is really about maintaining emotional and psychological balance so that not every setback sends us to the cliff edge contemplating jumping off. This is an exercise we all must master in our lives if we are to soldier on in the face of adversity, and as the old saying goes, into every life a little bit of rain…
Mud-puddle has always been a word or word contraction that I have always liked for some reason. It was the great novelist Sinclair Lewis, America’s first Nobel Laureate for literature as well as Pulitzer Prize writer, who won those accolades “for his vigorous and graphic art of description” when he described in his first and most famous novel, Main Street, the confines of small town American life, with its “mud–puddles and ragged weeds by the…
For years now, I have thought to myself that I simply don’t understand why people listen to podcasts. Meanwhile podcasting has grown to become one of the most profitable mediums (to the podcaster) with the most audience appeal and an absolute influence on the political scene. It is now being said that Joe Rogan single-handedly won this election for Trump by swaying 11-15 million listeners (mostly young males) to the Trump camp, thanks to his…