David McCullough now seems as much a “seer” peering ahead as an American historian.
Click this LINK to hear “American Society: Civil and Uncivil” at the Westminster Town Hall Forum.
Scroll the recording forward to 2:58 for the beginning “American Society: Civil and Uncivil.”
If “attitude is caught, not taught,” what are America’s children catching in 2020?
– Gordon C. Stewart, Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Chaska, MN, August 17, 2020.
Cabin life is nice when I can get it, but Marilyn Armstrong’s wonky SERENDIPITY sense of reality (SCROLL DOWN) did it again this morning. It brought me to my senses with a chuckle.
Author David McCullough at manual typewriter
Only David McCullough with his manual typewriter is exempt. David does all his writing from his trusty manual typewriter. No word processor cutting, pasting, erasing.
I’m no David McCullough! Neither is Marilyn. But only one of us is forthright about the computer addiction.
Marilyn and I have never met face-to-face. We became “friends” through the blogosphere. But I did meet David McCullough years ago while hosting him as Moderator of the Westminster Town Hall Forum. Wise. Genuinely self-effacing. Humble. And wise in an “old-fashioned” sort of way.
Enjoy Marilyn’s lovely post,
Gordon
SERENDIPITY: SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH
You see stuff online — Facebook mostly — about “could you live in this lovely (log cabin) house (in the middle of really nowhere) without WiFi? And everyone says “Oh sure! I could live in that great little house — in the middle of a huge woods by a cold lake where the nearest shopping center is 50 miles on dirt roads — forever without so much as a VOIP phone.
Sure you could. NOT.
I know I couldn’t and wouldn’t even want to try. Because that’s not life or at least not my life.
There was a time when I could imagine a life without computers. I think that was before I owned a computer, before every house everywhere had one or many computers. Before every single thing in the house got “connected” and computerized in some way. Before your toilet got so smart you have to argue with…
View original post 260 more words
I had a good idea recently. Stop hyperventilating about Donald Trump and focus instead on American history; really focus. It is helping me and I highly recommend it. There is, of course, so much to hyperventilate and worry about, something new every day: Russian interference in the election and the President’s obvious unconcern, his rejection of the high moral vision expressed in American foreign policy for two and a half centuries and replacing it with a starkly different vision articulated by two top presidential advisers, H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn in the Wall Street Journal: “The President embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” That is a very different and harsh vision which David Brooks described as “moral decoupling…morality has nothing to do with anything…
View original post 677 more words
Views from the Edge 