Two years ago today – it was the day after Labor Day, 2008 – eight of us got up very early, and made our way over to Concordia University in St. Paul, to make final preparations for, and open, the Peace Island Conference, sponsored by the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers. It turned out to be […]
It was a bit over a year ago – July 24, 2009 – when I wrote my first blog post about Health Care Reform. It was about that time when I got the first of many forwarded e-mails raging about intrusion of the government into health care policy, citing chapter and verse from some huge […]
Posts directly related here and here. The Glenn Beck extravaganza at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 2010, has come and gone. Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune estimated the crowd at “Tens of thousands“; then, in the same article, mentioned “hundreds of thousands“; and even “a million strong” (my Congresswoman Michele Bachmann). There are no official […]
August 28, 1963, I was a soldier in a U.S. Army Infantry Company. We were playing war in South Carolina, and had been slogging through the outback of that state for a week or more. Certainly, we had no access to television, and I don’t recall any contact with the outside world via radio either. […]
Yesterday was the opening of the Minnesota State Fair, and like much of Minnesota, my State Fair gene kicks in, and I’ll make my way there, zombie-like, making my usual rounds, having my usual “health foods”, and come home again. It’s an annual ritual. I can’t help myself…. Every two years, coincident with the State […]
August 20 we spent a delightful evening at the Minnesota Orchestra Guarantors Concert at Orchestra Hall. We’re long-time subscribers, so the superb music was no surprise. Beginning Friday night, August 27, 2010, the same Minnesota Orchestra performs in London at the famed BBC Proms – the only American orchestra on this years Proms list. Over […]
Every now and then, if one pays attention, someone wanders into their life and makes a difference just by being who he or she is. For me, one such person is Lynn Elling, Minneapolis, closing in on 90 years young, and 67 years of marriage to Donna. Lots of us want to make a difference. […]
Usually OutsideTheWalls is a sleepy blog hamlet in the blog universe. The two posts about the pullout of American combat troops from Iraq (here and here) excited an unusual amount of comment on my regular list* – over half of the many comments agreeing with me; the other half not. (I have disabled the comment […]
This post relates directly to #227 – The Last Truck Out. My guess is that there are relatively few who truly believe that Perpetual War is the path to Perpetual Peace. Even those who recite the assorted ‘might is right’ mantras probably doubt the wisdom of this position. Tens of millions upon tens of millions […]
Last night about 6:55 p.m. local time I turned on the TV to watch some evening news. Rather than what I expected, I was watching the last combat units pulling out of Iraq into neighboring Kuwait. I sat transfixed by this until near 9 p.m. my time, and (if I recall rightly) 3:53 a.m. local […]