Category: Soap Box

I’m back. I’ve been off WordPress for some time, working on a book (completion date December 2022). Given the importance of these midterms, I wanted to offer a few thoughts and a last minute plea to get out the vote. It resurfaces my thoughts from a 2020 post, refreshed for the 2022 midterms. ======================= “I’m […]

As summer 2019 was just beginning to stretch its legs, The New York Times and the New York Magazine took several potshots at Waldorf Education and The Green Meadow Waldorf School here in the writhing metropolis of Chestnut Ridge, NY. Caught somewhere between “He who hesitates is lost,” and “Look before you leap,” I took […]

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Ronald Reagan This Memorial Day, I am reminded of something my father used to say to honor this weekend.  “Don’t take your freedom lightly.” If I wasn’t completely tuned-in, he would add, “It was more expensive than you can ever imagine.” While the only action […]

Each year on MLK day, I take a moment to read and watch excerpts from Dr. King. My usual m.o. is to provide a few handy links to his “I Have A Dream” speech, a dream made all the more poignant today by the nightmarish ineptitude of our fools on The Hill. This year, other […]

First pants. Then shoes. The wisdom of this core principle has successfully guided dressing practices since the dawn of pants and enjoys the rare distinction of almost complete bipartisan support. It’s also noteworthy, that since its inception, this adage has almost entirely eradicated all incidences of post traumatic dress disorder. Most important, the purity of […]

The doctor on call for my June 29 appendectomy happened to be a proctologist, one of the many random details that came rushing at me as my gurney careened toward the operating room. In the 15 minute Tsunami of activity that had taken place between determining my appendix was counting down to detonation and the looming surgery, I had barely begun to…

In the wake of the tragic cowardly attacks in NYC on Tuesday (10.31.2017), I have this vision of ISIS leaders monitoring American news outlets and once again gleefully shaking their heads with a combination of jubilation and disbelief.  Unarmed innocent women, children and men killed or injured. “Shukran!”   Major media outlets obsess and plaster […]

In October of 2017, I had a vision that Chief of staff John Kelly took a walk through Arlington Cemetery. To the haunting sound of a bugler playing Taps, he stepped among and then beyond the stones of some of “the finest men and women on earth,” stopping finally at a cheap plastic picket fence […]

The press limits and fixates its reporting of earthquakes to measurements on the Richter scale. They toss us a number, usually projected at the epicenter of a target behind them, and we take their dollop of science and run with it. The higher the number, the greater the pucker factor.  Done. But the Richter scale […]