Musings Of A New Southern Man

I am safely tucked away in my home, doing my part to beat the big, bad Coronavirus Pandemic. (It interrupts our lives in so many ways that it deserves capital letters.) My Deb and I know the value of social distancing because we're in both high-risk groups, being older than 60 and possessing health conditions. Not to sound melodramatic, but the entrance of coronavirus into our home has the potential to be a death sentence. I thus think and act differently. We often have groceries brought to our home, although I do go out to shop in rare instances. I made that most dreaded trip of all just yesterday, venturing into a Walmart. (Oh my!) I never shake hands anymore. The only person I hug is Deb. We don't get to see our grandchildren up close and personal even though we live about a 10-minute drive away. We see them via FaceTime. I was ready for this because of years of practice. In a way, I was made for this. One foundational plank in my makeup is that I can adapt to damned n

     I am always fascinated by Malcolm Gladwell's thoughts and analysis. I am increasingly interested in his observations on a tactic called priming that he examines in his book Blink. Here's a brief introduction to the concept.      A professor of psychology gave student volunteers a set of scrambled sentences. The professor didn't tell the participants anything about what the study was designed to do or what the sentences were intended to do. Here are some examples: 1.       him was worried she always 2.       shoes give replace old the 3.       be will sweat lonely they 4.       should now withdraw forgetful we 5.       sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins      The sentences are not meant to form a sentence or use words to form one. It’s to give indicator words to elicit an emotional response. What could be the object of such sentences? They all contain words that denote getting old.    There are terms such as “worried,”   "replace," 

Imagine this: You are the younger sibling in the British royal family. That's what Dec. 26 must feel like. That oldest sibling, the one in line to become king, has been ballyhooed about since his birth. Articles have been written about him, and experts on all things royal concentrate on what 4-year-old King To Be is like, or 8-year-old King To Be, or King To Be as he enters puberty. The younger sibling is forced to watch it all. He or she must smile and wave properly in all those family gatherings in which everyone must smile and wave properly. But that younger sibling knows that the most that will be said about his or her ranking in the pecking order is "Edward will begin school next year" or "little Beatrice acted in a kindergarten Christmas pageant yesterday." We've heard nothing but Christmas this and Christmas that for months. We saw holiday decorations in retail stores as early as early October. People waiting for that big day stuck to budgets or f

I was walking down the main street of tiny Minturn, Colorado, a few weeks ago and noticed a saying painted above a front porch. It started with "Home is ..." I will give you the rest of that sentence later, but those first words are a perfect place to begin a conversation. How would you finish off "Home is ..."? That could be a loaded question that looks simple on the surface. All my suggestions would be positive statements because my home is wonderful, and the home in which I grew up in was strong and loving. But it depends on what your home is or was. Here's some possible statements I'd paint above my front porch. Home is Where Love Covers All the Drama Home is Where Comfort Resides Home is Where False Image Fails Home is Where Our Children Are Always Welcome Home is the Safest Place Home is Where You Matter I could go on, but it would be more of the same. My idea of home was founded on the place where my dad brought the ethics and toughn

My first thoughts when I considered my subject here was that my considerations were preposterous. It seemed as if no link between die-hard Democrat Harry Truman and the pompous Donald Trump could be possible. Their politics are almost polar opposites, Truman being the ultimate liberal and Trump the reactionary right winger. Truman was a Missouri farm boy, Trump the heir to a New York real estate empire. Truman was humble, Trump arrogant. Truman is said to always look to find the best in humans, Trump shows he can find the worst whenever it is expedient. However, there are three attributes that make them twins in history, the least of which is that their names are very close in spelling. 1. Political savvy about the electorate. First, both Truman and Trump were expected to be routed on Election Day. Thomas Dewey was far ahead in the polls in the months leading up to the 1948 election. Truman's popularity at the end of World War II plummeted in the years after. He then launched wha

I didn't know James F. (Jimmy) Byrnes as anything other than a name on a high school in South Carolina. I guess a guy needs to do something of interest to have a school named after him. I didn't realize the impact of the man until I started reading David McCullough's brilliant biography Truman , about the man thrust into the presidency when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945. By all rights, the man to take FDR's place should have been Jimmy Byrnes. The Democrats faced a huge decision in 1944 as FDR was readying his bid for a fourth term as president. The current vice president, Henry Wallace, was viewed as the wrong man to remain in the job. The party wanted a man with the right qualifications, someone with experience in working with Congress and who had a strong record in foreign relations. Jimmy Byrnes was that man. FDR said as much, and the Democrats entered the 1944 convention in Chicago with Byrnes the clear frontrunner to get the nod. The problem was that Byrn