Skip to main content

Writing the Occasional Obituary...

I have, enjoyed in my life writing the occasional obituary, interviewing the public or private figure for a newspaper, or doing the occasional biographical sketch of someone I new or wished I had known.  These writings are an opportunity for a journalist to step back from the dry facts of the day and look at the human beings that really matter.  Did not Jesus say that even the hairs on your head have been numbered?  So often in blogging or journalism we look at the 'issues' and 'events' as those those were the most important things, the stuff of history.  But for God, who is so high above our ways, it is the human hearts and minds that are important.  As I am going to be writing about the margins of society as the primary focus of this blog, I will endeavor to put the human face on the situation by writing about people who lived in those margins, or figures who were exemplary for their efforts at social justice.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Serenading the Donkey

Over the years I have had many times when I have had to call out others on their words, behavior, or attitudes on race, class or ethnicity and I have used a variety of means to get my point across.  The first  such incident was when I was 13 years old and my sister and a friend were skipping rope to the rope song that uses the "N_" word.   I said we don't use that word in this place and the girls argued with me about it. I just said that if they used that word I would go tell Grandpa, and they complied.  In a high school the teacher had let the discussion degenerate and the topic of "welfare" came up and a girl stated  an old stereotype that my Daddy says "All the blacks go pick up their welfare checks in Cadillacs."  I wanted that direction of the conversation to end immediately, so I blurted out "Well your Daddy is a racist."  There was silence in the room for a couple of minutes and then the teacher changed the subject.  When people have b
 Striking at Bourgeois Values with "Free Stuff"  Why is it that in middle class neighborhoods no one would think anything of it if you are having a "yard sale"  or a "moving sale", spending your entire day selling your possessions at pennies on the dollar, a tenth of what you could get on E-Bay, making less than the federal minimum wage for your efforts, but they would shrink in horror from a "free stuff pile".  What is the world coming from that  they place so little value on material possessions that they would give it away for nothing.  Someone will surely complain that you are doing "illegal dumping", even if you tend the pile and fold things back up.  Fortunately for me, I live in a neighborhood with a heavy student population, north of Seattle's University of Washington campus, and such a pile is welcome.  Having purged the house of unneeded things that aren't worth my time trying to sell (unlike my art, which I will find