Category: Humans

JFK’s Last Speech

“In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason – or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.”

Excerpted from John F. Kennedy’s undelivered speech to the Dallas Citizens Council, scheduled for November 22, 1963, the day he was assassinated.

My novel is available here: The Last Island

 

Faith, Recklessness, and Courage (Christmas in No-Man’s Land)

There were three men against the back wall with AK-47s.  They were unshaven, unmoving, and looked as if the last time they smiled there was blood on the ground.   They glared at me and there was an even chance that I was the first American they’d ever seen.  Communism had just fallen and, since no system of law, order or enforcement had yet taken its place, these men had become all of those things.

They were guarding the ‘businessmen’ that I was meeting with in a rural village in Bulgaria, businessmen who were money changers, importers/exporters, and a rural ex-party mafia rolled into one.  I was here to sell a tractor, the first modern western tractor in the country as far as any of us knew, and though I didn’t want to be negotiating with ‘businessmen’ like these, there was no choice.  They could move large equipment; they had money; and they had protection. Continue reading “Faith, Recklessness, and Courage (Christmas in No-Man’s Land)”

Oedipus Wrecks the Shoreline: The Coastal Development Proposal in Greece

Greek Island

“If your age could understand, children,
Full many counsels I could give.”

Greek tragedies play out like no others, as if to remind us of the work of their ancient masters. As there once was a plague in Sophocles’ Thebes, there is now a plague upon the Greek economy. Continue reading “Oedipus Wrecks the Shoreline: The Coastal Development Proposal in Greece”