A Train Whistles Past

Painting by Emma Childs

A train whistles past

Wistful, mournful and happy

Hello and goodbye.

A Cloud of Sparrows

A cloud of sparrows

Making the popcorn dance like

A second popping.

Conservatives, the True Victims

When you want to invade some innocent nation, or beat some helpless party half to death, or rape them, it's always useful to first claim YOU are THEIR victim. Throws up a nice smoke screen.

Keep Fighting Anyway

The people fighting on the right side are always in the minority, and often don’t see victory in their lifetimes. The abolitionists were sneered at and spat upon by most Americans, remember. 

But the people fighting on the right side are the ones who matter, and there’s a satisfaction in knowing who’s right — the people whose goals are compassion and civilization — and who is so clearly wrong in the eyes of history. We must fight on with an untroubled spirit. 

And I have changed people’s minds. Not many, but a few. I also changed my own, which was my best accomplishment.

Fox News: It Really Is Scary

Fox News: That channel where all the vaccinated spokesmodels warn their audience about how much they should fear vaccines.

Unfrightened By Your Menaces

One of my top-ten quotes is from Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

He also said, accurately: “Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”

Stuck in a Preconventional Society

My friend Jim Beamesderfer on how the Kohlberg scale relates to current events: “The graphic shows the levels of maturity in social and personal morality as a person ages. Anti-mask, anti-vax people are generally at level 2, with some use of level 4 as a weapon rather than accepting it as the way to behave in society. The upper two levels do not require strong religious beliefs, which tend to use level 1 as their motivation, but instead a mature acknowledgment of individual obligation to those around us, regardless of theological beliefs.”

Note that not everybody reaches Kohlberg's “adult level” of moral development. Whatever their age, many people remain stuck at the bottom, and they are the source of all our current troubles.