Recent Blog Posts

Anger seems plentiful in America.  While it has uses, it can be easily overdone, degrading our personal and civic lives.

People divide across police lines, air waves and cyberspace.  In so many ways we separate ourselves from each other, often loudly, sometimes violently.  If this is not the America we want, we need to change.

In society today, every group seems angry at some other group. Instead of collaboration we get condemnation. Welcome to tribal America.

It is worth asking if we are meeting the test of civic virtue George Washington set in his Farewell Address.  Do we have sufficient centripetal forces in our public life to maintain what he called “union and brotherly affection.” 

Good solutions to complex societal problems are rarely quick. Until we lend more patience to understanding them and nurturing the relationships that allow us to act with consensus, we will stay captives to our current frustration.

A child of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson saw a future pregnant with human happiness as long as conscience and reason remained unfettered.  America, of course, has not always lived up to Jefferson’s epitaph.  This is one of those times. 

What we need is less effort in pronouncing the other side wrong and more in questioning whether we are right.  We need a dose of humility to calm the curse of certainty.