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The Dark Shadow Cast by the Golden Rule
Most societies seem to have some version of the Golden Rule. That only makes sense. It would be hard to live amongst one’s fellow humans without one. I really do try to do unto others as I would have them do unto me. I can’t imagine functioning any other way. The thing I struggle with…
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Bitterness
The other night we had a wind storm. At 3 a.m. it ripped open my screen door. Bang! This, naturally, caused my dog to go ballistic, and his hysterical tirade prevented me from going back to sleep right away. It also woke me up right in the middle of REM sleep, which caused me to…
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Keeping Score
A friend of mine apologized recently. She said, “A couple of months ago, you told me you loved me, and I didn’t respond in kind. I’ve felt guilty ever since. I’m just not good at being open like that.” Now I feel guilty, because I hadn’t even noticed that she hadn’t responded in kind. And…
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EVERY American Deserves a Political Apology
No, I’m not talking about who won or didn’t win this election (believe it or not). As a matter of fact, I wrote the first draft of this entry well before election day. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, I think we can all agree that this whole campaign experience has been…
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How People Become Radicalized
Nothing makes me feel more bitter and cynical than feeling that I’m being treated unfairly. My mother would say, “Life isn’t fair.” Yeah, ma, I know. But that doesn’t give people a free pass to take advantage of that atmosphere and pile on. You still have the moral, ethical, and often legal obligation to do…
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Drop Dead? Really?
We all come with baggage if we’ve actually made an effort to live our lives. Mine includes staying in a 16 year relationship that made me, for the most part, really unhappy. Don’t get me wrong. He was a really good guy. And we did have our good times. That’s why I stayed so long. That…
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Spiting Yourself
I know someone who was passed over for a promotion that everyone assumed he would get. He’d earned it. He deserved it. He had been doing that job without the promotion for well over a year. But when the time came, someone else got hired. He even had to train that person. Needless to say,…
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“You Deserve to be Happy.”
I saw that tag line in a Facebook advertisement for therapy, and it made me think of a conversation I had with a friend from Burma. He said, “In the West, you think you deserve happiness, so you get upset, depressed, anxious or bitter if you don’t have it. In the East, we don’t expect…
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Rota Fortunae
A friend of mine challenged me to write a blog entry about the Wheel of Fortune. Not the game show, thank goodness, but a much meatier topic: the medieval philosophy about fate. So here goes. You see this topic coming up over and over again in the literature of the time. They believed that the…
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Generosity
I can always tell when my coworkers are burned out. They stop coming to work early. In fact, some of them will arrive a few minutes early but wait in their cars, only coming in at the last possible moment. They are perfectly within their rights to do so, of course, but what that means…