The headline “Many Catholics react favorably to Brown’s election” occupied a front-page slot in the Boston Pilot of January 22, 2010.
I nominate it as among the most biased newspaper leads in recent history and one of the most banal. Were a respectable secular newspaper to have published such a one-sided head, surely it would become the target of outraged protest. This official house organ for the Archdiocese of Boston, however, can expect to get away with pro-Republican propaganda.
At the History Table yesterday, we commemorated the crime writer Robert Parker who died this week. This Cambridge author was found at his desk where he wrote, six days a week, his widely admired detective fiction.
Talking about Parker stirred mention of other writers in this genre. No one of us could remember the name of a Bostonian who had a reputation for similar work. I could recall the title of one book, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but not the author. However, I promised to come up with his name by later in the afternoon.
In fact, I did better than that. Within the next five or ten minutes the name George Higgins printed itself on my inner brain screen. We all agreed that was he was the writer who, just a short time before, had eluded the memory of us all.
This recovery of memory is what I like to call a true “senior moment.” Why not emphasize the astounding power of memory, even when it may have slowed down, rather than focusing on the negative inability to produce a name, or other answer, immediately?
Thinking about your own death does not make you morbid. It may even be one of the best ways of appreciating one’s life, of getting more value out of every day.
The novelist Chaim Potok recounts a father answering his six-year-old son Asher’s question about why every living thing must die: “Why? So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever is never precious.”
My college classmate and longtime dear friend Carlos, writing from Monterrey, Mexico, knows how to pose difficult questions. Speaking of the murderer at Fort Hood, he asks:
The guy was a citizen, so what does “citizenship” mean? What should the core values of citizens be? Can a religion like Islam, many of whose members hold “anti-American” views on the structure of society, be free like other religions are? What should be the values/beliefs of people joining the military?
The freedom of one person’s belief vs the well being of society. What should society’s attitude be towards newcomers who don’t share some of the core values, or may implicitly threaten them?
He wants me to respond but, as of now, the questions go beyond my knowledge and wisdom.
In an unexpected meeting last week with New York Times columnist David Brooks, I introduced myself as a fellow columnist. He then turned to me and muttered with a wry smile: “poor bastard.”
We live in a new era of history, one in which living to be old has become routine, at least for most of us. In the 20th century Americans gained 30 years in life expectency, more than had been reached in the preceding 5,000 years of human history.
What a mystery! Too much reality for us to grasp.
Great spiritual traditions have always taught the same message: there can be no foolproof security on earth. At this point in history no one needs to be convinced of this fact. What we do need is light on how to live in an insecure world. We want to know how to adjust to a new situation marked by threats that cannot be identified in advance.