Martyrs by Randall Auxier Have you ever been in a room with someone important? There’s an energy some of these people exude that is pretty hard to describe. I was once in a room with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore. They all had the energy, but to my surprise, Clinton’s energy overpowered…
The Fisted Glove by Randall Auxier Stephen Stills once wrote “There’s a rose in the fisted glove, and the eagle flies with the dove.” I have never been able to get these images out of my head. I just see the fisted glove with the rose, and the eagle protecting the dove. It’s about power…
As the wealthy accrue more and more power, the middle class disappears, and the number of poor and homeless increases there are those that still cling to the myth that we live in a capitalistic economy that rewards those with grit and determination. The poor are poor because they lack gumption: they are so by…
Tactic, Strategy, Philosophy by Randall Auxier Nonviolence. This is a sculpture by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd. The original is outside the UN in New York. What is the “non” in nonviolence? Just refraining from hitting somebody? Some people say that is what ahimsa, means, the idea used by Gandhi that gets translated as “nonviolence.” It’s…
Urd, or The Enigma Project by Randall Auxier You might not think you know this sentence, but you do: “Oy esd yjr nrdy pg yo,rd. oy esd yjr eptdy pg yo,rd/” I spent a couple of weeks in Poland this past summer, and for all the world, the language, lovely as it is, sounded…
“The entire modern deification of survival per se, survival returning to itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive excellence in what survives, except the capacity for more survival still, is surely the strangest intellectual stopping place ever proposed by one man to another.” William James It has become a commonplace to…
Bus 109 by Randall Auxier To tell the truth, I don’t remember the bus number. I thought I would never forget it. But I chose 109 because Kate Campbell’s song by that name pretty well sums it up. It was a strange time to be a kid. (I speak from experience.) In the South,…
White Devils by Randall Auxier This woman is many things to the people in her life, but I want to write about some things she isn’t. For the record, I don’t know her name. I know only that she is from Bangladesh –assuming the website has this right (which is not a safe approach to…
There are still those among us who deny that scientific truth has any sort of hold on free minds. We can believe anything we want and call “true” anything we find comfortable they maintain. But while we can certainly believe anything we want to — there are those among us who think the earth is…
Conversion(s) by Randall Auxier Here is a smiling Malcolm X. Many think of him as the angriest black man ever, and the most famous photographs of him show intensity, conviction, defiance, an iron will. Yet, those who knew him well always talked about his sense of humor, his charm, his easy manner. Men and…