Joining the chorus of appraisals after a year of the pandemic, I feel compelled to add my testimonial. Like so many people who have come through this nightmare unscathed, I have learned a lot about myself and life in general. At the same time, like many of you, the time has given me the opportunity…

Perhaps the Covid Monster will have the last word and will paraphrase Mark Twain’s saying that “reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.” Given the human folly of recklessness and the threats of new variants and mutations, who knows. There may still be serious surges, and the success of the current vaccines may be…

Every day I try to read Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. She does a good job of keeping up with current events and placing them in historical context. Last week she wrote about the “liberal consensus” that existed after World War II before its demise beginning in the 1980s. According to her definition,…

I’ve been out of pocket for a couple days. A good friend stopped by, and we went down to Amelia Island to rendezvous with family before taking a day trip exploring the “old Florida” away from the coast. It was a nice respite after months spent holed up; fully vaccinated, we felt emboldened to strike…

This morning the sun came out. That is, my morning read gave me hope that sanity might prevail in our politics. The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by a leading Republican moderate and the editor wrote a rebuttal to Trump’s recent lies. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy in an Op-Ed entitled “An Open Congress…

The question of voter suppression is increasingly front page news across the nation. Nowhere is this more dramatic than here in Georgia. The Republican-controlled legislature has introduced two bills to restrict voting in the state by ending automatic voter registration, weakening absentee voting and banning drop boxes for mail ballots. Coming on the heels of…

It has been a little over a year since the terrible murder of young Ahmaud Arbery, just a few short miles from where I am now writing these words. Maybe that’s why his death has haunted me so much this past year when similar stories were reported in the press. It all seems so incongruous…

What do Yogi Berra’s famous quote “Deja vu all over again” and The Kingston Trio’s song “The Merry Minuet” have in common? Answer: They both touched on the essence of what makes us human: we frequently, if not routinely, keep doing the same things over and over. Consequently we are our own worst enemies. Some…

After a year of self-imposed isolation and reluctance to see friends and family, we finally busted out. We invited three oyster-loving friends who we knew had also been holed up by themselves during the pandemic. That and the fact that the five of us, average age 74, all had our second vaccine shot gave us…

For a long time now, especially the last four years, conservatives and Republicans have been bashing the media for fraudulent reporting and spinning the news. They argue, of course, that the media is liberal and biased in its reporting. There may be something to this charge, but not for the reasons given. An article on…