PAUL CHRISTENSEN

A friend of mine was the son of a man who had survived the Bataan Death March. He had seen men stagger out of line knowing they would be machine-gunned. He kept his head down. He didn't talk to others. He was slow to react to the commands of the enemy herding them on, pushing them beyond their limits. He would breathe slowly, and let the air out like a monk meditating in a temple. His stoicism may have saved his life. But he had given up a precious virtue -- anticipation. He

I used to wander around on lower Broadway in Manhattan when I was still a teenager. I had a dead-end job at a valve company taking orders from plumbers wanting a gate valve or oversized coupling for an apartment building going up. Broadway at the time, maybe still is, a desolate street of old warehouses long boarded up and given over to the rats. You might see an occasional drunk sleeping in the doorway of one of these 19th century caverns, with his tattered overcoat wrapped

Well, let's see what we are confronting these days. Inflation is affecting half of America's families. The Supreme Court is about to end Roe v. Wade for good and set a new era of underground abortions that will likely harm and even kill many women who can't afford to have a baby. The new omicron variant of Covid is loose and spreading with the usual rapacious speed, not unlike the wildfires of last summer. A boy of fifteen went on a murder spree with the help of his parents,