Why we shouldn’t confuse the pursuit of money with the pursuit of happiness.
By John Hancock
The outcomes are not good. Here are a few recent examples in my news feed:
• $600 in shopping vouchers were a powerful inducement to get pregnant women to stop smoking.
• Some seats in the stadium for the Super Bowl sold for more $20,000.
• Even for those who didn’t attend football’s biggest game, we gambled an average of $12 (the per-person rate for all us Americans) for a chance to get other people’s money, for fun.
• In the Hamptons, a 29-year-old man killed his investment banker over a $200/month reduction in his monthly allowance. Continue reading The Wealth Money Can’t Buy→
The savage campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama is a stain on our history. But it offers no excuses for him, nor us, to not pursue justice in one of the darkest chapters of our history.
By Tim Connor
Seven years ago I set aside a platter of cynicism to caucus in my community for the candidate who eventually became the nation’s first black President.
I don’t exactly remember the ratio of hope to disgust behind that decision. The war in Iraq—induced with false pretenses and fabricated intelligence—had become an expensive, bloody quagmire. Worse, still, was Vice President Dick Cheney’s pronouncement in September 2001 that the U.S. would go to the “dark side” and use “any means at our disposal” to fight terrorism. This not only led to the shame of Abu Ghraib but to the sanctioning of physical and psychological cruelty as a tool of national policy. Along the way, the Bush Administration twisted arms and minds to euphemize torture as an “enhanced interrogation technique” and, in so doing, basically put the U.S. government in moral league with Latin American drug lords. Continue reading A Tortured Presidency→
With the radio on, I was driving toward Spokane along Highway 2 in early June when an opportunity jumped out at me.
“…We really need more football officials because we cover three hundred plus youth football games each year,” the voice said.
Such was the demand for new referees, the voice continued, that it was likely applicants would actually get to work games in the coming season.
I can imagine the audience to whom this plea for help was intended. I didn’t imagine it was an invitation aimed at a widow with a daughter just out of college.
