Deserved

This morning I read that Lindsey Graham was questioning the 14th amendment. Maybe being born here is not enough, he hinted. I don’t know what it means to be a citizen of this country. I just happened to be born here. It’s for convenience that we have this born-on-American-soil rule. For the convenience of the […]

Bugs

In our front yard, there’s an abandoned treehouse. I was going to the mailbox, and I looked past the ash tree, toward the treehouse. I never look that direction. The mailbox is, you know, business, and not pleasure, and also you don’t really look at the place you live. The treehouse is left over from […]

The Home of the Brave

Before the 1680s, a “bigot” referred specifically to a person intolerant of other religions. After that time, it expanded to intolerance of all sorts of things– other races and cultures, for example. The idea that there should not be a mosque near ground zero is covered before and after 1680. There is no good reason […]

Glamour

Late at night, I pulled into my driveway and saw that somebody was standing out on my landlord’s side porch, working the grill. I had just gotten back from a three-week sojourn in my favorite city. Sigh. “Hey,” I called out. I didn’t usually talk to this guy much. He worked for my landlord, handyman […]