I have before me the transcript of President Trump’s inaugural speech. I didn’t quite have the stomach to watch it live, so I waited to read it. I don’t regret my choice so far. There’s a lot of hot air in this speech, plenty that sounds threatening; and, surprisingly, there were a couple items at which I nodded my head. It would be great to have good infrastructure, and I also hate abandoned factories (which are abundant in this part of... Read more
I have two notes for my readers, ahead of this nightmare inauguration. First of all, there is a photo circulating the internet; it was shared, when I saw it, by someone named Kelly Devlin but I don’t know if she took the photo. I can’t share it here because I don’t know who took it or who holds the copyright. It isn’t a fake photo, but I want to caution my readers that it it’s not what it looks like. The photo appears to... Read more
Author’s note: One day in foggy, rainy winter, here in the Ohio Valley, I was walking through my neighborhood on a poor street. I saw some houses standing and occupied, some houses abandoned, and some that had been torn down and were nothing but piles of splinters. “It looks like a bomb went off here,” I said. And I decided to bomb it, as writers do, in a story. The Winter came at the end of the Christmas season—not the... Read more
You Carried Me: A Daughter’s Memoir is the memoir of someone who is inconvenient. She doesn’t fit anybody’s narrative. Because she was an inconvenience to her biological grandmother, Melissa Ohden was nearly killed by a saline injection abortion forced on her mother. But, after three days of labor, Ohden was born alive. She was transferred to the NICU, thrived, and was eventually adopted; she had a perfectly normal childhood with none of the physical or mental disabilities usually associated with... Read more
Whenever one discusses healthcare in America, one runs into all kinds of interesting people with diverse opinions. Some of these opinions are ill-informed. Sometimes I’m at a loss as to how I can inform people, and then I remember that I have a blog. Here are three tips: 1) “Communism”refers to a classless society (that is, a society without division into social classes, not a society that behaves like Donald Trump) where there is no private property, the means of production... Read more
Here’s a tweet we could all stand to remember right now: Let’s all compare John Lewis’s decision to permit himself to be beaten into unconsciousness in peaceful protest on “Bloody Sunday,” with what TV’s Donald Trump has called his “personal Vietnam.” Let us remember that any real greatness America has ever had has been because of those who courageously stood up against the abuse of power, and never because of the money and privilege of the powerful. Willingness to stand up... Read more
All my friends are posting lists of “ten albums that influenced me as a teen.” Sounds like a fun project. I want to play along. The trouble is, I didn’t really have any “albums” as a teen. Most of my teen years were spent on the Planet Charismatic and its satellites in the world of homeschooling, and I didn’t like contemporary music much anyway. I listened to all kinds of other things, though. We listened to the radio. At first... Read more
I used to be a big fan of the Catholic League. When I was a naive and bookish homeschooler, I read their journal Catalyst. I admired their work in defending Catholics from defamation and mockery. I assumed they must be right about how downtrodden we are. I had never been out in the big bad world where Catholics suffered so much hardship and taunting, but I presumed it did exist. I even wrote a term paper on anti-Catholic bias in the... Read more
I have a friend who really wants to get a message out to everyone, about the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Ksenia posted this to her Facebook today: I keep seeing things saying if the ACA saved you, you should share your story with people to motivate them to save it. But I am too exhausted now. I’ve been sharing for months and now I’m just too tired and scared. And it seems like they don’t care anyways. So the... Read more
I just got done with the 25th anniversary edition of Joan Wester Anderson’s Where Angels Walk: True Stories of Heavenly Visitors. I’d never read the original volume; this one has been updated with several new stories and a retrospective by the author. Where Angels Walk is a long compilation of stories, obviously mostly unverifiable, by people who have experienced angelic intervention in their lives. Some of these people are famous: Corrie Ten Boom, Saint Pio and Mother Angelica make appearances. Many... Read more
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