Social Commentary
Historical category no longer used.
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On walkabout, garlic poked through the mulch. It is spring. I assembled the portable greenhouse yesterday afternoon. The extra space and light will make a difference, another step toward planting the garden. A big batch of vegetable soup simmered on the stove most of the day. We ate it for dinner and filled five quart… Read more
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I came across a war diary from the 1940s. While not sure how it came to be mine, it likely came from a box of odds and ends at an estate auction or from the used book section of a thrift shop. The first entry, tells a story of an Iowan at the time of… Read more
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There was life before the pandemic, then there is now. Everything got scrambled, some things literally during the Aug. 10 derecho. Yet the biggest event, the one that brought the most change, has been adjusting to the coronavirus pandemic. It is a pandemic. A next door neighbor got the virus. So did one across the… Read more
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When the U.S. Congress passed the CARES Act there was an unspoken assumption the coronavirus pandemic would be of short duration and gone by now. Based on this, the Republican president and Republican Iowa governor pushed to “reopen the economy.” As they did we discovered Iowa and the nation were still on the upward slope… Read more
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This summer marks 50 years since about 260 of us graduated from Davenport Assumption High School. As a group, we were never close and that makes organizing a class reunion difficult. There won’t be one this year. It was a Catholic high school and parish loyalties continued through the four years. To some degree, those… Read more
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(Re-blogged from my post on Blog for Iowa, July 4, 2010). We hear a lot about the founding fathers today, and the truth is who they were, as people, is clouded in the river of time. One admires the portrait of John Adams written by David McCullough, and particularly the personal risk to which Adams… Read more
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There have been 7.3 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus worldwide according to this morning’s Washington Post. The virus has killed more than 410,000 of which 112,978 deaths occurred in the U.S. since Feb. 29. Mitigation of the coronavirus is not going well here. Poorer countries have done much better handling the crisis. Absent leadership,… Read more
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We have to look at ourselves in the mirror and consider whether we are racist. It’s not easy to do in the best of circumstances. Dictionaries consistently define a racist as someone who has a notion that one’s own ethnic stock or genetic makeup is superior. Which is it, ethnicity or genetics that defines race?… Read more
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The absence of definitive guidance on what society should be doing during the coronavirus pandemic led us to a path of individual choices. When Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds proclaimed the disaster emergency on March 9 few of us knew what to expect. Sadly, three months later that continues to be true. Our social behavior is… Read more
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