Two weeks ago, I joined in the celebration of my friend Dan’s birthday.
A birthday might not normally rate a column. However, the carrot cake chosen for this occasion boasted three candles, marked one, zero, and zero.
Yes, my friend is now one hundred years old. I feel excited about his having reached the century mark, since he is the first of my close friends to do so.
Was Hitler really dead? Did he actually commit suicide in the Berlin bunker constructed for his use?
How could the United States, with its British and French allies, ever bring about democracy in the Germany shattered by war? Would not the forces of the Soviet Union continue to disrupt their efforts?
Pepin the Short, Louis the Pious, Charles the Bald.
Are they familiar characters for you? They did not qualify as household words for me until this summer. That’s when I took a course in medieval history, presented by Yale University.
Yale had never touched my academic life. Till now.
It’s not enough to respect yourself. All of us need to be respected by others as well.
When that fails to happen, we are shocked, quite appropriately.
Millions of YouTube watchers were horrified, a few weeks ago, by what they saw happen to a woman named Karen Klein. A video showed a group of middle school students making a shocking attack on this woman’s dignity.
“Please don’t go, Jack.” I felt myself pressing this warning on President Kennedy as he prepared to fly to Texas in late November of 1963.
Such was my emotional response to Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power, volume four of his great biography of Lyndon Johnson. And it wasn’t only the writer’s account of the Kennedy assassination that brought me to tears. Throughout my reading of the 600 pages, I often choked with deep feelings about the many people and dramatic events described.
“The most important moral problem facing America today.” That’s what Robert Putnam calls the inequality plaguing our society.
It was not always so. As recently as the 1960s we were becoming more equal. But by the next decade, inequality among social classes had increased again and is even worse today.
At springtime, my attention turns to seniors. No, not old people this time, but rather the young men and women who have been graduating from our colleges.
I imagine having been asked to speak at one of the many graduation ceremonies. In my fantasy, I stand before thousands of students, offering some of my insights.