Can wild horses and broken soldiers help each other?
By Larry Shook Ah Kah Tah is a Blackfeet Indian phrase that means “Going Home.” My friend Earl Barlow, a Blackfeet, told me that.
Ah Kah Tah is also the name Nate Ostrander and I have given to the five-year-old mustang gelding we brought home from the Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse holding facility at Burns, Oregon. We’re going to experiment on both the horse and me.
Here’s our question: can you take a sixty-nine-year old veteran whose heart and psyche have been shattered by war and teach him to train a mustang—a creature arrested in the heaven of open range for the crime of freedom—in a way that gives both him and the horse a new life? Continue reading Of Mustangs and Warriors→
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→
The joke is always some variation on us running around the house naked, shouting, “I got the balloon!”
By Jamie Borgan
It’s two days after Christmas. I’m sitting at a dining room table that’s been stretched to accommodate my friend Teresa’s extended family while, half comatose from overconsumption of sugar, we try to corral fourteen people into playing Turbo Cranium.
