BARBED WIRE AND ACRES OF HOPE is a collection of essays reflecting on the gifts bestowed upon us by our American forebears, and how the Republican Party has been systematically attempting to take those gifts from us and our children. The brief vignettes remind us that we are not only the beneficiaries but also the stewards of those gifts. Please consider recommending the book to your personal network and asking them to do the same. Barbed Wire & Acres of Hope is now available in eBook form on Amazon and will be there in paperback form soon. Barbed Wire & Acres of Hope on Amazon For those who do not have a Kindle, Amazon does make a ...

  Do you know what your ceiling looks like on sleepless nights? I’m betting you do. Wide-eyed for hours. Anxious. Numb. Searching. Clawing for resolution to another real-life nightmare.   I’m not talking small stuff here. Not the latest skirmish at work. Not some science project needing attention. But you knew that. You’re already going where you keep your private stock of worries.   My private stock? Well, I’ll share three. For a teenager, a mom who wouldn’t be making it through seven years of radical surgeries, radiation, and chemo. Later, a brother-in-law with the same breast cancer succumbing early to a bout ...

In an age when falsehoods arrive in gleaming packages promising truth, ferreting out actual truth to help us make the most important decisions of our lives can be daunting.  Yet, the consequences of bad decisions are escalating daily.  If only we could know one truth, one big TRUTH, we could shine a light on its deniers and know they routinely lie about a host of other things as well. This quandary was vexing me for the umpteenth time the other day when I found myself staring at my smartphone.  I had my answer. In 2018 alone, Apple and its competitors were granted thousands of patents, most containing multiple inventions, many of which are ...

The White House defense team and our Republican Lawmakers say so.   I’ve always thought that the main difference between us humans and other animals is not apposable thumbs. Oh no, the difference lies in our ability to come up with lame self-serving rationalizations at the drop of a hat to explain our misdeeds, no matter how egregious. If I’m right on this, the White House attorneys reached the pinnacle of the evolutionary pyramid during the first day of Q & A in the Impeachment Trial of Donald John Trump.   With the Republican lawmakers, from Mitch McConnell on down having painted themselves into a coronary (my wife’s ...

Post-WWII rural America. I grew up a city mouse—town mouse really—on the edge of farm country, a mysterious realm spreading northward toward Wisconsin. In no time, I could be pedaling along a road bearing my family’s name, a single thread bordered by barbed wire and acres of hope, crisscrossing other such threads to form the web of community.   Owen Center was out there too, at a quiet intersection—a grange hall next to a church, across from the one-room schoolhouse where my dad had toiled with other farm kids through the eighth grade. This tiny cloister often erupted into a hive of cooperation and social discourse where daily farm ...

This is not the time to debate gun control. It’s been just a few days since the last massacre of ______________. (Please insert one of these: high school students; grade schoolers; adults at a gathering; a friend; my relative; your spouse; their child.) We should not debate while family and friends grieve, and their grief can last a lifetime, so there is never a good time to debate. So, let’s change the subject. I have a story for you. I grew up in an undistinguished neighborhood in mid-century Illinois near the Wisconsin border. But, the kids in my neighborhood? We all knew we had it good. Pickup games at Ridge Park, rickety tree forts, ...

Parenting. It’s just a word to a young couple thinking about maybe having kids. Then, it happens. The kids, I mean. Everything getting real, fast. The jitters hit us—a ton of bricks in a diaper. Some check out parenting gurus. Some wing it. Some are red. Some are blue. All are green. All soldier on. And finally, we become expert, after the fact, with that first one. Our first-timer false starts and miscues aside, we’ve got the next one covered. There’s a swagger in our step. We’ve got this. Except, of course, that our next child isn’t anything like the first!   Anxiety. As they get bigger, so do the problems. I don’t ...