Tag: oped

ramblings

On Being Thankful

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It’s Thanksgiving, our national holiday of overeating mixed with family agita, and the Gray Lady has a good op-ed about it. It says in part:

It’s worth raising a glass (or suspending a forkful for those of you who’ve gotten ahead of the toast) to be thankful for the unexpected, for all the ways that life interrupts and renews itself without warning. What would our lives look like if they held only what we’d planned? Where would our wisdom or patience — or our hope — come from?

From the last Turkey Day to this one, a lot has changed in both my personal and professional lives. It’s true: the one constrant in life is change. While this change may often bring sadness and unhappiness, it can also brings delight and joy. The op-ed closes with:

Most of what life contains comes to us unexpectedly after all. It is our job to welcome it and give it meaning. So let us toast what we cannot know and could not have guessed, and to the unexpected ways our lives will merge in Thanksgivings to come.

Gobble gobble.

politics

On Terrorism

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From Paul Krugman’s Op-Ed piece entitled “Cult of Death” from the Tuesday, 9/7/04 edition of the New York Times:


“Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil [i.e. terrorism]. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve? They’re still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed after Sept. 11: ‘It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable.’ This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. this is what makes it so frightening. This is what scauses so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don’t want to confront this horror. so they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.”