Archive

My father taught me to be on time. Being late was considered arrogant and implied that my time was somehow worth more than other people’s. On my grade school report… Read More

Vermonters have again decided in favor of equal rights for its diversifying citizenry. While there are some who see Vermont as The Pied Piper of New England, leading us down… Read More

When I was very young, we read about national and international events weeks after they occurred. Signal events in the Korean War, advances in nuclear science, or the discovery of… Read More

A friend was just laid off… badly I must add. It’s not that her employer did not have to lay her off. That was not the question. The “badly” part… Read More

An unavoidable part of this particular holiday season is the need to survey the wreckage of last year, and the staggering damage we and our elected leaders have wrought on… Read More

A central, if unspoken, ideological argument today is about government, whether it is good or bad? Government of course is neither. It is simply an organizing principle around which societies… Read More

In healthcare, we do know a few things. We know for example that very few will ever be able to afford on their own all the healthcare they will need… Read More

When I was first married 40 some years ago, there was little spare money for Christmas toys. We relied on well heeled relatives to fill the empty white area under… Read More

I am going to talk about everyone’s least favorite subject, not death, the other one. At its best, taxation is how a citizenry funds the services it feels are be… Read More

Why can’t we communicate? Too much communication. How do you feel while talking with someone who’s reading emails? We’re in the Metropolitan Opera to hear Renée Fleming in La Traviata.… Read More

We are often called the “consumer society.” The term has mixed meaning. All societies are in fact consumer societies. An Afghan tribal village consumes, as do people in Williston. The… Read More

I am a man of girth, overweight, fat….there I said it. But what does it mean? Physiologically it means simply that I consume more calories than I burn, nothing more,… Read More