In Word or Deed

Photo by  Felix Russell-Saw   on  Unsplash Today was hard.  It was hard to sit at this computer and stare at a blank page and to watch the hours tick by while that same page stubbornly refused to fill itself with words. Sometimes you don't have much to say.  Sometimes you just don't have anything to say. Nevertheless I moved my fingers across this keyboard, filling up this space with something. I'm writing, even it's nothing, because I made a choice. Sometimes it comes down to pure choice. In life we run into situations where it can be very easy to just, not. Not do this, not do that, not do whatever. What we do in those moments will usually be the result of a choice made long before. We are -in large measure- who we choose to be.  For example, over four years ago I made the choice to be a husband. That choice carried with it myriad other choices that are all interrelated and interconnected and all of them already made. I will love this woman

Fractured. A word that could easily and justifiably be used to describe America today. We are a melting pot that has grown steadily colder, congealing into a mass of disparate ingredients that want virtually nothing to do with each other. Worse still, we see each other as enemies. A bunch of scary shadowy groups of people that are...different. Didn't we used to be one country? Didn't we used to be unified? Didn't there used to be a generally understood consensus of right and wrong? In a word, no. Well, not 'no' exactly but not 'yes' either. The United States of American has always been a place where wildly different groups of people have coexisted with varying degrees of success. Pilgrims and Native Americans, Exiles and Indentured Servants, French and English, Irish and Italian, Black and White, Liberal and Conservative; the groups have changed and multiplied over time but the issue remains the same: how can people who are so very d