Rocking in a rocking chair or throwing rocks is the question.

The choice is between a quieter reflection and bold resistance to the evils I deplore. Between sitting in the Amish rocker Jacob Miller built to the dimensions of my fanny, rocking in hopes of seeing things more clearly, or getting up off my fanny to throw some rocks.

More years ago than the one when Jacob Miller built his Amish rocker to fit my fanny, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater threw a rock through a store window during a peace demonstration in downtown Whitewater against all pre-march instructions and agreements.

Such moments cause one to sit and rock awhile when the rocks are flying.

Philosophy has become a four-letter word in our time and that’s a shame. Not philosophy as fruitless speculation or obtuse abstraction, as in the American anti-intellectual prejudice against it. We mean philosophy as the search for reality, the plumbing of the depths for the deeper currents that flow beneath the thin surface of what we think, believe, and do.

Amish Rocking chair

The news of another killing of an unarmed civilian here in the Greater Twin Cities of Minnesota and of moral and spiritual madness in the White House leads me to reach for the rocks. Active resistance is required. But there will be no effective resistance to the madness without rocking on our fannies together to get to the bottom of our collective madness. Otherwise there will be only the rock-throwing. We’ll be off our fannies . . . and off our rockers.

• Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, July 23, 2017