Events of the Day (Page 19)

I was born a little less than eight years after President Kennedy’s assassination, so I don’t have any direct memories of that event. But the shockwaves that event has sent through time are truly amazing to behold, even to this day. I don’t know where those shockwaves lead, but it occurs to me that our country is now run by people who grew up with the knowledge that a President could be violently removed from office. That’s the kind of thing that colors the world in a way that we don’t often realize. Who do I think killed President Kennedy?Down the rabbit hole….

It seems to me that the best thanks to all veterans would be to work as hard as we can to avoid the creation of more war veterans in the future. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

Terrific article about the closing of a beloved local restaurant in Indiana: On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before the lock refused to lock, before the claw crashed through the roof, the old man paced. Tap, tap, tap. Bud Powell’s aluminum cane led the way as he circled the floor of Bloomington’s Waffle House. His Waffle House. That Wednesday in September, the owner didn’t know what to do with himself. The smell of frying oil, the same greasy perfume that had greeted customers for 46 years, wafted into his nose asDown the rabbit hole….

That is all. Ixnay on the utdown-shay! Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

Sports columnist Jason Whitlock is often an interesting commentator on race issues, particularly as they relate to sports. Here’s an excerpt from his column today: The people at the top of the rap music food chain should not be afforded such easy forgiveness. They know exactly what they’re doing. They know the dishonesty and the illogic that fuels the popular sentiment within commercial rap music industry that states the embrace of the N-word is harmless because young people have redefined it and erased its dehumanizing power. This popular mantra is every bit as intellectually dishonest as the mantra that slavery,Down the rabbit hole….

We expect our legal system to produce moral consequences, and yet, so often it does not. It’s probably the case that a codified legal system can’t be expected to always produce moral consequences, precisely because what’s moral cannot be so precisely codified. But this does not excuse a lack of efforts to try to make it better, and it certainly does not lessen the pain that arises when the moral and the legal so spectacularly fail to intersect. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

(A repost of what I’ve run on July 4 the last couple of years) Here’s a really weird story. It’s so weird, I’m not sure the historians didn’t make it up out of whole cloth. It seems that around 235 years ago or so, some folks living in a place under the rule of a King decided that they didn’t much like the way that King was ruling them. At all. They pretty much decided, en masse, that their King was behaving, to use a current term, like a douche. Now, over the many centuries before these folks came along,Down the rabbit hole….

I’m trying to wrap my head around this story. A convicted murderer is about to go free in Indiana. The case has never been in doubt; this isn’t a case of innocence-by-DNA. The woman confessed to the crime, and there has never been any challenge to her conviction. The sentence, however, was: the woman was sentenced to death. But she was only 16 at the time. Murderers are…well, they’re murderers, and I struggle with my notion of how best to deal with them. I honestly do believe in rehabilitation and maybe even redemption, and this woman has served 27 yearsDown the rabbit hole….