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The Search

A swarm of state aircraft were flying grids over the rugged valley where I live, looking for signs of Larry’s downed plane: broken trees, an oil slick in a lake, a signal fire. Like most others, I went about my work, expecting the search planes to find Larry and the children soon, refusing to indulge bad thoughts while there was still hope for good news.

Sunbeams

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

Agnes Repplier

Sunbeams

How is it that you do not know how to interpret these times?

Luke 12:56

On Regret

Of all the things Greenfeld said, the word that resonates most when I ponder the question of regret is kittenness. “It’s hard when they lose their kittenness,” he said.

Get A Job

Why Welfare Reform Is An Attack On All Women

What is being proposed under the title “welfare reform” is cuts in programs for the poorest and most vulnerable members of American society: nutritional programs and Medicaid programs and housing programs and programs for the aged, impoverished, and disabled. But the program that is most targeted for reform is Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a program for poor mothers and their children. Men can get benefits, too, but the overwhelming majority of parents on AFDC are women, about five million of them, with about nine million children.

Silas

Silas works at a social-service agency. He sits inside a cubicle, behind a metal desk with a simulated-wood surface. One by one, people — mostly old women, but some old men, too — come and sit on a metal folding chair across the desk from Silas, where they weep and whine and struggle to maintain their dignity and finally grow vexed and demand their Social Security checks.

Sunbeams

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

Tennessee Williams

On Racism And Nonviolence

An Interview With Arun Gandhi

Peace without nonviolence is impractical. Some people think, if there is no war, we have peace. But, in effect, no society is at peace at the moment. In the United States, there is street violence. This is not peace at all. No country has ever made an attempt to achieve a thoroughly peaceful society.

Sunbeams

I did not go to the Maggid of Mezeritch to learn Torah from him, but to watch him tie his boot laces.

A Hasidic rabbi

Sunbeams

All of life is a foreign country.

Jack Kerouac