Thomas Paine in 1776 did in 1776 what Thomas Paine in 1774 was incapable of.  In an extended treatise called Common Sense, he laid out the logic of why even soft despotism was an unnatural condition for an enlightened time, and why it was a act of common sense to remove oneself from monarchial oversight […]... Read More

“Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong.  But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer in the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different.  That is […]... Read More

Sin.  Remorse. Confession. Redemption.  These are the steps of an ancient process of acknowledging a societal standard for behavior and using a form of public confession with its resultant  humiliation to induce behavior modification.   Hester Prynne, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel of the struggles of an individual and society to come to grips with ‘unacceptable’ behavior, wore a Scarlet Letter to […]... Read More

     The past week was pregnant with omens for those of us who fear the permanent estrangement of a people from the magnificent experiment in liberty their founders created for them.  The fragile nature of our experiment, a means of societal empowerment in which the free will of a people is balanced by the order of measured laws, […]... Read More