Women with bull horns are in the streets crusading against oppression by men. With a fervor reminiscent of Joan of Arc, all they are missing is her white horse. Until recently, I doubted the abuse of women to be so pervasive as to warrant wholesale gender rebellion. There is no fundamental flaw in my male character, I fumed, that demands reformation. But, as more reports surface about women, particularly young girls, who were forced to wage private battles against sexual harassment, another story comes to mind that gives me pause. The year is 1962. A teenager is shoehorned into the…
By: Thomas Taschinger Editorial Page Editor Beaumont Enterprise Sunday November 5, 2017 Published hours before the Sutherland Springs, Texas massacre In a nation divided over almost everything from tax rates to voter I.D. laws, apparently we can add another category to argue about: mass killings. You read that correctly. Even though these kinds of tragedies should produce a united reaction of sympathy and outrage, they are starting to split us along predictable political patterns. On Tuesday an immigrant from Uzbekistan drove a rental truck onto a bicycle path in New York City, killing eight and injuring several others. The perpetrator, wounded…
Frank Sinatra got it right: But now the days grow short I’m in the autumn of the year And now I think of my life as vintage wine From fine old kegs From the brim to the dregs And it poured sweet and clear It was a very good year
By: Joe Bunting The Write Practice Quotes from A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir about his life as a writer in Paris: Write One True Sentence “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. Cut Out the Ornamentation If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that…
GOODBYE, MY FRIENDS By Art Buchwald Friday, January 19, 2007 Editor’s Note: Art Buchwald asked that this column be distributed following his death. Buchwald wrote the column on Feb. 8, 2006, after deciding to check into a hospice, suffering from kidney failure. He had discontinued dialysis and also had one of his legs amputated below the knee. He subsequently was released from the hospice, wrote a book about his experience and also resumed writing his syndicated newspaper column. He died Wednesday surrounded by family members. Several of my friends have persuaded me to write this final column, which is something…
The powerful punch of Hurricane Harvey did more than knock us to the canvas. It put into perspective the inadequacy of man made defenses when pitted against the forces of nature. High-tech water treatment plants, 500 year flood plains, reservoirs, and flood control systems were neutralized by Harvey in one day. Steel and concrete alone were not enough. Over the vast sweep of history, no cities, regardless of their advanced design, have weathered the ravages of time and nature. Rome burned. What do we have in common with these lost civilizations? They thought they could engineer their way to invincibility….
THANKS, PAL By: Andy Rooney April 18, 1985 Ernie Pyle, who wrote the book Brave Men, was the best kind of brave man I ever knew. He didn’t have the thoughtless, macho kind of bravado that is sometimes mistaken for bravery. He was a war correspondent who was afraid of being killed but did what he had to do in spite of it. Mostly, Ernie stayed right with the infantrymen who were doing the fighting and the dying. On the scrubby little island of Ie Shima, Ernie was moving up with the infantry when he was shot dead by a…
Les Européens qui se préoccupent de la dette de l’euro me rappellent comment leur rivalité aurait pu évoquer un désastre d’un genre différent. Il s’est passé un jour au Butlin’s Holiday Camp à Bognor Regis sur la côte sud de l’Angleterre. Je travaillais un emploi d’été dans le parc d’attraction. J’ai couru l’inclinaison-à-tourbillon. À côté de moi, une grande roue de quatre étages était grande. Du haut de la roue géante, un jour clair, vous pouvez voir à travers la Manche à Calais. Nous avons eu beaucoup de touristes français. Les Français et les Anglais ne s’entendent pas. Les premiers…
Reader response to the “Plain Talk Can Bring Us Together” column has been brisk. For those of you who are willing to take the challenge of Plain Talk, I encourage you to forward the article to someone of another ethnicity with whom you would like to discuss your thoughts. If you wish, you may forward to me the results of your conversation or post them on my Facebook page at Mack Gibson-Writer. I will also edit for length all responses and post them here (anonymously if you prefer).
I have been a marathoner half my life. For the past three decades I’ve welcomed each New Year’s morning with a long run. Only runners would view this as a positive thing. It does, however, give me pause to reflect on the past year and what the next one may hold in store. As I was considering how the scars from 2016 may have blighted our prospects for a profitable 2017, it dawned on me how wrongheaded my thinking was. In runners’ parlance, the New Year is not a series of sprints to be won or lost. Rather, it is…
