W.J. Astore Former Army Ranger Rory Fanning has a thoughtful article at TomDispatch.com on why young men should not join the Army to fight the war on terror in distant lands. Here’s an excerpt: Believe me, it [the Afghan War] was ugly. We were often enough targeting innocent people based on bad intelligence and…
W.J. Astore On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a powerful speech (“Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence”) that condemned America’s war in Vietnam. Exactly one year later, he was assassinated in Memphis. What follows are excerpts from MLK’s speech. I urge you to read it in its entirety, but I’d…
b. traven We talk a lot about war on this blog but we only talk about the deaths as numbers killed. We don’t talk about the intimate details of how a mother, a father, a spouse and children, and other relatives and loved ones can handle that horror. The government and the media like to…
W.J. Astore In 2006, I presented the following talk on Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. It’s a dangerous myth, and sadly a common one, that Jewish people did not resist the Nazis in meaningful or effective ways. From this myth stems a far more insidious one: that Jewish people were somehow complicit in the murderous…
Steve Naidamast In my last two pieces (“Why Nothing Works – Parts I & II”), I discussed the failure of software development to support the transactions in daily life dominated by current software foundations. Further, the misuse of modern software capabilities is having deleterious effects sociologically across a wide spectrum of users, especially here in…
P.J. Sullivan The controversy over health care in America misses an important point, that the human body is a self-healing organism. Americans think that doctors and medicines are the only options for the sick. They are not. There will always be a role for doctors, but the majority of illnesses are preventable and curable without…
W.J. Astore Americans tend to fear death. It makes us uncomfortable. Yet death is inevitable. Its inevitability should teach us to revel in the richness of the here and now. It should also teach us the foolishness of undue pride. All is vanity, the Bible teaches. Death reminds us of this — that human vanity,…
W.J. Astore The other day my wife and I were watching Wadjda, a terrific film about a spirited Saudi girl who dreams of buying and riding her very own bicycle. The film does a great job of highlighting the constraints put on women in traditional Saudi and Islamic culture. Women are not allowed to drive,…
W.J. Astore In December 2010, I wrote the article below for Truthout. Even as the economy was sputtering and jobs were scarce, Congress was seeking to cut unemployment benefits. Eventually, a compromise was forged to maintain the benefits; the price was more tax cuts for the richest Americans. Angered by the hypocrisy and greed on…
A World War II Veteran I am 90 years old. I have lived through much. My parents were immigrants from post-World War I Europe. Following the Crash of 1929 we were very poor. Our country was awash in poverty, and anti-Semitism was widespread. When I was about ten years old, my father, who had been…
The Contrary Perspective 