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War
The Swing
Catch lit a joint and smoked it as he drove past the Gulf Coast Pak & Ship, which still had its sun-faded WE SHIP FOR THE HOLIDAYS sign up from last year. It was Friday, Christmas Eve, and he was going to fetch his holiday bonus from Mr. Zimmer in the big yellow house, his last paycheck for the week.
December 2007November 2007
My father’s parents, who lived with us throughout my childhood, fled Russia in 1905 to escape poverty and the state-sponsored massacres of Jews, called pogroms. They told me about the elation they’d felt when, after an arduous three-week ocean journey, they’d glimpsed the majestic statue in New York Harbor for the first time.
November 2007Sunbeams
July 2007We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.
July 2007
No, I don’t like demonstrations. But, to my mind, showing up for a march like this is the civic equivalent of doing the dishes or emptying the trash: the dirty, unglamorous work of living in a democracy.
July 2007Be Not Silent
Sister Joan Chittister Speaks Out On War, Feminism, And The Catholic Church
I am opposed to abortion as a birth-control method. At the same time, I ask myself how it is that the Catholic Church can hold that all abortions are equally, gravely sinful at all times, but that death may be inflicted in other circumstances without always being equally, gravely sinful. The Church teaches that you may kill to punish, to defend yourself, or to defend the state, and you are not committing a sin. In areas where men are most often in charge of life — as they are in the justice system or the military — they may kill by the thousands, and the Church won’t say a word about it. But when a woman is in charge of that decision, as she is when it comes to abortion, the Church pronounces that it is always, under all circumstances, gravely immoral and deeply sinful.
June 2007
Sunbeams
May 2007What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.
May 2007
I inadvertently stepped on my cat Nimbus in the dark this morning. I’ve already apologized, and she doesn’t appear hurt, but I feel as if I’ve started the day by invading another country. Would a jury of my peers convict me for such a careless act?
May 2007Shade
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.
May 2007
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