By Wayne Allensworth The ghosts of Christmases past are still very much with us. I’m quite thankful they are, for those “ghosts” remind us of a time that was less sterile and less fragmented. So, it’s no surprise that the proponents of “progress” have made war on those ghosts and on that particular holiday. Tom Piatak has done great service in his efforts to note and counter what...
By Wayne Allensworth The idea of progress holds that mankind has advanced in the past … is now advancing and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future… The idea of progress is a synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future. It is inseparable from a sense of time flowing in a unilinear fashion. — Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress The 21st Century has been...
By Wayne Allensworth I had to be careful. The ornaments were wrapped, each one in tissue paper and some of them were very old. I had dropped a couple of them and they shattered. As brittle as dried leaves. Their skins had grown thin as they had grown old. Christmas ornaments collected by my mother over time. So many Santa Claus ornaments, old St. Nick in his jolliest attire, thick beard and...
By Wayne Allensworth A light in the night sky on a prairie horizon. A falling star passing through a deep blue firmament that phases ever so subtly to lighter shades of blue bordered by a wisp of cottony clouds. The red orange hues of the setting sun. Stark tree limbs seem to reach for the star on a smoky autumn evening. Let your eyes stay riveted on the star as long as you can see its proud...
By Wayne Allensworth On Veteran’s Day, Tom Piatak reminded us of some veterans who will never be thanked for their service, men who, after heroically performing their duty on the U.S.S. Liberty, have been all but forgotten. None of the hawkish GOP presidential candidates, much less any Democrats, will ever ask for a moment of silence for the men lost, and none have or ever will demand that their...
By Wayne Allensworth I was walking down a path that skirted a fence line not far from our home. In the neighboring pasture the great longhorns, one of them a majestic bull, grazed quietly, looking up casually to watch me pass. The great bull shook his head and snorted, then went back to grazing. Overhead, a hawk hovered over the trail, then a second one appeared above the other raptor, twin...
By Wayne Allensworth (Edvard Munch, The Scream) Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold… William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming This is the third of my articles on Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, and its implications. An overview of his ideas is found in A Hole in the World and Between Two Worlds: Iain...
By Wayne Allensworth As it appears the Israelis are gearing up for a ground campaign in Gaza, threatening a general war in the Middle East that could draw American fighting men into the festivities, it’s time to assess just what America has at stake at home relative to its already overextended foreign commitments. It’s now becoming clear that “MAGA” was always an illusion. “America First” was the...
By Wayne Allensworth I was taking a walk on a cool morning. Fall had finally arrived after a blistering summer. Live oak limbs made a canopy over the path, and their long shadows trailed across me, with little breaks between the limbs where the smoky autumn sun shined through. And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a butterfly’s shadow tracing its way through the limbs, and I looked up and...
By Wayne Allensworth Judging by some of the rants I’ve seen on social media condemning arguments against further American involvement in the Middle East quagmire, one would have thought that the United States was an Axis power in WWII and can never atone for what happened to Europe’s Jews at the hands of the Nazis. So, off to war we must go, this time against Iran, perhaps. For the record...
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