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Shade

A Letter From Gettysburg

I didn’t learn about the tree-cutting program at Gettysburg National Military Park until I saw early evidence of its implementation. Just north of the hill known as Little Round Top, more than a hundred large trees — maples, oaks, tulip trees, mulberries, magnolias, cedars, hickories, and ash — were felled and hauled away in a matter of weeks.

Cuba Libre

Halfway through the first day, we passed an army caravan. Father said they were going to the Sierra Maestra mountains to kill Fidel Castro, “the enemy of Fulgencio Batista and General Motors.” I knew nothing then about Batista’s dictatorship and Castro’s attempts to overthrow it.

Mission Accomplished

I’ve become obsessed with George W. Bush. I spend hours Googling “George W. Bush low IQ” (500,000 hits), “George W. Bush stubborn asshole” (67,000 hits), and “George W. Bush deranged maniac” (43,000 hits). I loathe this man with an intensity that makes my stomach hurt. Why he wasn’t thrown out of office long ago baffles me.

The Unseen Life That Dreams Us

John O’Donohue On The Secret Landscapes Of Imagination And Spirit

The U.S. is a great country. You can live the way you want there; you can be a self-made person. But sometimes, when all our energy goes into progress, acquisition, and productivity, it leaves a huge emptiness in the heart. I think the teachings of Meister Eckhart can address that emptiness, can show us how to be patient with it, and in fact bring us deeper into it. At the heart of our emptiness, we can actually discover nourishment in the secret landscapes of imagination and spirit.

Free Spirits

I have walked the few blocks down to the pond on campus tonight because I read in the paper that some Buddhists from the local sangha are going to free the souls of a lot of people who were bombed at Hiroshima.

Sunbeams

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.

Major General Smedley Butler

Good Friends

A backyard barbecue, a Portuguese man-of-war, a game of croquet

Seduced By War

Andrew J. Bacevich On How The U.S. Came To Put Too Much Faith In Military Power

In retrospect we can see that the Gulf War wasn’t the triumph it seemed to be at the time. In a tactical sense, we succeeded in ejecting Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait, and we did it with great speed and remarkably modest casualties on our side. But in the long run all we really did was wade deeper into a political morass that we don’t understand. After the war, the decision was made to maintain U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia. And, because we didn’t remove Saddam Hussein from power, we ended up with a policy of military containment that had us imposing sanctions on Iraq — with horrific results for the Iraqi people — and bombing the country on a weekly, if not daily, basis, beginning in 1998. So we went tripping blindly down the path to September 11, 2001. The Gulf War was a pivotal event leading to this mess we call the “global war on terror.”