I stood in a public place yesterday and watched two tearful parents say goodbye to an American hero. The young man was leaving for a year. Odds are, he will return safe and sound. But the world is a dangerous place. There are no guarantees. They were sending him into harm’s way.
His odds of survival are good. Although he is only 23-years-old, he is already a veteran of four years of service in the United States Navy. He served in Somalia and the Persian Gulf, and was highly decorated during those tours. He is quiet, but loving and eager to lend a hand. When his sister fell ill...
April 5, 2012
I saw the White Devil the other day, and it terrified and saddened me. He was reflected in the look of wariness and suspicion in a young man’s eye. The kid couldn’t have been more than fourteen. He had the lean and supple look of someone not yet bent by time. He was carrying a sign with a symbol on it and a phrase I did not recognize.
"What’s that mean?," I asked the young man.
He recoiled just a touch, a discernable flinch that was powerful, a sign I was crossing a line, and was, perhaps not welcome where I was seeking to go.
The young man told me it...
April 1, 2012
The claims and counterclaims regarding the killing of Trayvon Martin are flying fast and furious. It’s well past time to get this case into a courtroom. Here is how it can get to court immediately.
But first, some preliminaries.
Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida on February 26, 2011, more than one month ago. Initial reports were that the young man was simply walking along the street when an armed white man shot him to death. The shooter, George Zimmerman, was described as a vigilante, an armed, self-appointed neighborhood watch captain who shot a young...
March 31, 2012
I find it almost impossible to walk away from a fight, which explains, I suppose, my choice of vocation. Trying cases is one of the few places left in which a hired gun can take aim and fire. So I am still grumbling about Occupy New Haven and the Committee of Proprietors of Common and Undivided Lands in New Haven.
You see, colonial settlers "purchased" the land on which all of New Haven and several surrounding towns sit from local sachems in 1639 for an assortment of coats, axes, knives and other sundries. These settlers then formed a community, a theocracy of sorts. If the original...
March 29, 2012
March 28, 2012
"And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," Jesus is reported to have said. Somehow, I don’t think he foresaw just how...
March 26, 2012
In the Roman Coliseum the crowd voted thumbs up, or thumbs down based on the performance they had just witnessed. Life or death depended on the fancy...
March 25, 2012
"The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation," wrote Albert Jay Nock in Our Enemy, The...
March 22, 2012
Regular readers of this column – all three of you, but I exaggerate – have no doubt intuited the manner in which topics are selected each...
March 19, 2012
How strangers acquire not just the power but the right to make rules others must obey is a central preoccupation of political philosophers. Grand...
March 18, 2012
By the time my parents arrived in North America, all the land was taken. There wasn’t any left to claim. The continent, from one end to the...