Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
Lake Martin shimmers beneath a heavy midday sun. I am sitting on a dock. There are distant sounds of splashing. Kids laughing. All the children are swimming. All their respective adults are sitting ashore, dry. As adults often are. There is nothing like July on the lake.
It has been a few years now, but this Friday, we will once again be celebrating a Happy Fourth of July
There are a lot of things you can be. In fact, you can be anything you want in this life. You can just be yourself. You can be free. Be empowered. Be comfortable with who you are. Be invested in your own life.
They say blind dogs shouldn’t run. Namely because you can’t run when you’re a blind dog. You might run into stuff. Too many dangers. It’s scary.
Once upon a time, there was a duck named Lucky. He was small and white with a bright yellow bill, and he was born missing one leg. Lucky was unable to walk on land, but he could swim.
If my brain were a school bus, all the nerdy thoughts would be sitting up front. These are the responsible, grown-up thoughts, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and neckties, performing important tasks on calculators, computing existentially vital equations such as, “Do BLTs actually need the L?”
Washington D.C. It was the height of summer. Early July. I was in town for a book event, to make a speech. I had time to kill, so I went to the National Mall. The National Mall is “America’s Front Yard.” There are thousands of tourists, and even more screaming babies.
Peace. I pray for peace.
Not national peace. Not global peace. Those concepts would be nice, but they are too big for my head to comprehend. No human has ever seen world peace. I don’t even know what it would look like.
When I was a kid, my mother believed in angels, but I didn’t. I was on the fence about angels. I didn’t believe in hocus pocus. My thought was, if angels were real, then why were they always the worst team in the Major Leagues?
“I am 10 years old. My name is Peyton. I am a girl. People think Peyton is a boy name. But it can be both. What is your favorite animal? Mine is a dolphin.
Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and Democrats who are older are not marching for the same reasons younger Democrats are marching at these various hate-fests.
Friends of the family say the boys couldn’t sit still without vibrating. They were always getting into something. To call them “bad” kids would be unfair. They weren’t bad. Not at all. They were simply professional hellraisers.
My dogs sleep all day. It’s just what they do. Except when they’re busy chewing up my 48th pair of reading glasses. They sleep, sleep, sleep. And amazingly, after a full day of sleeping, they don’t feel guilty about it. Not even a little.
As Russia and Ukraine battle, the ongoing three-year horrific account of Russians pilfering Ukrainian children is finally being reported. Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times tell the story of the nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children that were forcibly kidnapped from their homes by Russia’s occupying army.
I receive a lot of questions every day. I wish I could answer them all. But if I actually tried to answer every message, email, letter, smoke signal, etc., I’d need a permanent ureteral catheter installed.
This is weird. I realize this. But I wanted to write to you, dear loved one. Namely, because I’ve been dead for some time now. And the way I left this world happened so fast. So unexpected.
The 18-year-old girl was in the hospital room. Her bed sat amidst a forest of hissing machines and blinking lights. The young preacher knew he’d found the right room. He straightened his tie. This was the hardest part of his job.
The 14-year-old boy cried as he knelt beside his bedside, clasping his hands together. He sobbed, imploring the heavens for a miracle.
America: land of freedom, innovation, and baffling trailer ball sizes. We split the atom, landed on the moon, and built an internet where people argue about pineapple on pizza—but somehow, we still can’t agree on a standard trailer hitch ball.
Tomatoes are my favorite “non-vegetable” vegetable. I was recently informed by a smart person that tomatoes are—technically—a “fruit” because they are the ripened “ovary” of a flowering plant. But that’s just weird.