The most basic barrier was language itself, very few Americans in Iraq whether soldiers or diplomats or news paper reporters could speak more than a few words of Arabic. A remarkable number of them didn't even have translators. That meant for many Ir...
To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this: 1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason. 2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right. 3. Charity is immoral. 4. Pay for yo...
Just so you know,’ I explained, remembering my own earlier arrogance, ‘if you’ve ever owned a cat and therefore think you know how to handle a puma, you don’t. It would be like playing with sharks because you once owned a goldfish.
But somewhere in America, between the freeways and the Food-4-Less, between the filling stations and the 5-o-'clock news, behind the blue blinking light coming off the TV, there is a space, an empty space, between us, around us, inside us, that inevi...
The country was a dreamland; and perhaps it even reminded my wife's grandfather of the night he woke up drunk in his friend's house, beside his friend's wife, everything similar but new, different, better. The United States of America was like an ete...
As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: "What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recogn...
His fingers lightly grazed my cheek. "I didn't know you before. When you're not there, I can't concentrate. I'm wondering where you are, what you're doing...if you're there and I can see you, I can see you, I can focus. I know it's crazy, but that's ...
When I think about "Freedom" and America's future. You have to remember that "Freedom" is more about what you do in the trying moments......how you move forward.......and what path you set. It's more about who you are as a person..........like family...
Although Geoffrey, Gilbert and I grew up in this small place in Africa, we did many of the same things children do all over the world, only with slightly different materials. And talking with friends I've met from America and Europe, I now know this ...
America at a turning point! But in 1813 the United States and Nathan Jeffries may lose everything; blockaded, imprisoned, raided, massacred, Americans are feeling the wrath of British forces on land and sea. Nathan Jeffries, son of Captain William Je...
Where utopianism is advanced through gradualism rather than revolution, albeit steady and persistent as in democratic societies, it can deceive and disarm an unsuspecting population, which is largely content and passive. It is sold as reforming and i...
If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medications, do you run the risk of turning an anger-ridden t...
I am who I am firstly because of genetics, and, running a very close second, because of choices: ones my parents made, such as choosing to emigrate to America; ones their parents made, like my Papa Butler opting to ignore medical advice and instead w...
When we came to America, though, we didn't know what the right thing was. Here we lived with no map. We became invisible, the people who swam in between other people's lives, bussing dishes, delivering groceries. What was wrong? We didn't know. The m...
By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment ...
It is, then, not simply a question of black power or white power, but of how meaningfully to reenfranchise power. This, as I think Martin Luther King understood, is the real point, the real gift to America, of the struggle of the black people. In acc...
But here's the biggest head-scratcher of all: Not only are atheists destroying our country, they're completely deluding themselves. There's simply no way to prove that there is no God. If I didn't hate them so much, I'd feel bad for these folks. Imag...
In its essence, Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is one citizen’s soul-searing plea with his countrymen––Whites and Blacks––to recognize that racial disparities fueled by unwarranted bigotry were crippling America’s ...
Our plump predicament comes from the way we think. In America life has become a daily quest for instant gratification. Do we think about the long term? Rarely. We ask ourselves, “What sounds good?” That’s where we get into trouble focusing on w...
Here in Bosnia I had already seen several cases of rheumatic fever and a case we thought was miliary tuberculosis, diseases now rare in America. It was sobering to think that the mundane process of vaccinating these children might ultimately save mor...
Do not be afriad! I can see that Americans are not afraid. They are not afraid of the sun, they are not afraid of the wind, they are not afraid of 'today'. They are, generally speaking, brave, good people. And so I say to you today, always be brave. ...
