September 7, 2024

Woke policies cost lives

Like many people around the country, I have noticed that the roads and highways of my town have become more dangerous and that the number of fatal crashes and hit-and-run incidents seemed to be more deadly and frequent.  I became curious and dug...

September 5, 2024

Rising traffic deaths are the result of woke policies

Like many people around the country, I have noticed that the roads and highways of my town have become more dangerous and that the number of fatal crashes and hit-and-run incidents seems to be more deadly and frequent. I became curious and dug into t...

March 25, 2022

Let's do lunch

Older generations are familiar with a photograph titled "Lunch atop a skyscraper" (see image, below), which captures twelve men seated on a flange beam 800 feet above the streets of midtown Manhattan.  They are sitting thigh to th...

August 15, 2021

Our Founders imagined they would suffer so their descendants would not

“We are soldiers so that our sons can be farmers and their sons can be poets” is a quote often attributed to John Adams. He likely never uttered those words, but he did write something similar in a letter to a friend. While the sentiments...

June 11, 2021

In dealing with the left, a life lesson from a liquor store

The left's work culture makes many demands on Americans.  We are coerced to contort our grammar to accommodate gender theory.  We are instructed to accept promoting some people and demoting others based on race.  We are commanded t...

May 19, 2021

The equity movement distilled in a single student

Changes in how we organize society happen over decades and across generations.  Looking back, we can see shifts in our attitudes that signal movements that find their full expression many years later.  If we miss these signals, we...

May 12, 2021

Watermelons and giraffes

My daughter was born in June 2008, in Hollywood, California, the same year California voters went to the ballot box to reject same-sex "marriage" by a significant margin.  Over the course of the next seven years, court after court...

May 4, 2021

Sam Harris and societal decay

This week, my parish will hold a funeral mass for a parishioner who was killed in last month's Indianapolis FedEx shooting.  Eight people were murdered in cold blood.  The common response to this and other ghastly acts of viol...

May 1, 2021

Hard work

One recent morning while getting ready for work, I overheard a news broadcast in which a grown man, the subject of the story, was sobbing uncontrollably into his iPhone.  The backstory was that he had recently qualified for a Professional G...

April 7, 2021

Where are the men?

In March 1964, the New York Times reported that dozens of people heard the anguished cries of 29-year-old Kitty Genovese as she was raped and murdered outside her Queens, New York apartment but did nothing.  The Times wa...

March 23, 2021

Covid And The Costs Of The Technocratic State

Recently I learned that a friend’s child was hospitalized following an incident of self-harm. The details surrounding this event will remain undisclosed for obvious reasons, but it motivated me to write about an overlooked tragedy of the past y...

March 16, 2021

Truths, oaths, and affirmations

John Keats famously ended "Ode to a Grecian Urn" with the lines "'Truth is beauty, and beauty truth' — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."  These lines from an early 19th-century Roman...

March 8, 2021

Cesar Chávez would have hated the Biden administration

Biden has issued executive orders that ban enforcing immigration law while simultaneously inviting in a new wave of illegal aliens.  These E.O.s also suspend deporting illegal aliens, even those awaiting trial for felonies and other serious...

February 28, 2021

The Moral Lessons Of A Liquor Store In L.A.

Like most people, I found disquieting the rioting, looting, and arson we saw almost nightly across America last summer.  The scenes of chaos, violence, senseless acts of destruction, and thievery struck a chord with many people because we saw th...

February 23, 2021

BLM is coming to a school near you

School districts across America are voting to include Black Lives Matter in their primary and secondary school curricula.  Because whether BLM is taught at all should largely be dependent on how it is taught, it's im...

February 19, 2021

Wannabe Heroes In A Post-Heroic World

Watching the carefully cultivated images of everyone from faux-tough-guy Chris Cuomo to the latest transgender activist, I was reminded of a conversation I had many years ago with “Doug,” an acquaintance in Hollywood. As we sat on the pat...

February 15, 2021

Worshipping At The Altar Of Power

The second half of the 18th Century – the Age of Enlightenment – saw two different revolutions. The American Revolution was predicated on individual liberty and the Judeo-Christian principles of virtue. The French Revolution was based on ...

February 12, 2021

White Supremacy and the Dearth of Ideas

My wife was watching a TV program that caught my attention as I was walking through the room. It was an episode of Madame Secretary in which one of the protagonists is embedded in a White Supremacist organization to disrupt a pending attack. I commen...

February 3, 2021

On Race, Yogi Berra’s Insight About Ignorance Might Help

Former New York Yankees catcher and manager Yogi Berra is known for saying things that on the surface seem silly and shallow, but upon careful consideration have layers of meaning. One of those insights forces us to apply what we know about Black int...

January 30, 2021

A Blackout In Which We Cancel The Culture

They say a fish is unaware of water. Analogously, we are unaware of the environment in which we live our lives. Insofar as we do consider our environment, it is usually in terms of the physical world; the air we breathe, the water we drink, the clima...

January 20, 2021

Fauci, Cuomo and Postmodern Leadership

About a decade ago my wife, two-year-old daughter and I attended a birthday party in the Hollywood Hills. A thirty-something actress with some credits to her name was throwing a bash for her two-year-old daughter complete with petting zoo, two bouncy...