On the Bright Side

Every April, people around the world pause to recognize Earth Day, a day set aside to appreciate the planet and renew our commitment to caring for it. Communities organize beach cleanups, plant trees, and talk about protecting the natural world for future generations.  At its heart, Earth Day carries a simple but powerful idea: what we nurture today will shape the world tomorrow.  Today, environmentalism is often used as a shorthand for tribal identity. What began as a universal concern for conservation has been tilled into a political battlefield, and the seeds of division have been harvested in gridlock and resentment.   But the seeds of the modern environmental movement weren’t sown in a vacuum of ideology. In 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of California galvanized the nation. That disaster became the catalyst for the first Earth Day in 1970, and this led directly to the creation of the EPA and the passage of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act under the...

Go Ask Alice. What is the bright side to a life that was lived from rags to riches to a life sentence at an asylum? Finding someone 100 years later to reclaim your story and reimagine the T he idea struck me during a tour of Flagler’s Whitehall Museum in Palm Beach. Whitehall was a wedding gift from Henry Flagler to his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, after his second wife, Ida Alice Shourds, was institutionalized in 1895. Gilded Age buffs know that the reason the Standard Oil magnate came to Florida in the first place was due to the poor respiratory health of his first wife, Mary Harkness. And that Whitehall was a gift to his young new bride, Mary Lily Kenan. But little is known about his second wife, Alice, the wife between the two Marys. The docent led us up the staircase of the Grand Hall to the second-floor exhibits, informing us that “after the death of his beloved first wife, and having to put his second wife in a sanatorium, he finally found love again in Mary Lily… this is the La...

  People are asking that a lot lately, and unfortunately, the answer just seems to be, “It’s their fault.” The blame game  gives politicians plenty to exploit as they hope to rile us all up to vote this way or that. I see no sense in Republicans or Democrats claiming to know how to effectively govern in tumultuous times. This is a new historical moment. No one has the answers. None of us knows how to deal with global pandemics, artificial intelligence, and disinformation campaigns on the levels we are seeing today. No one. Because we have not been here before. We have, however, throughout the history of civilization, experienced tumultuous times. And we have not, historically, handled them well. It has been our human tendency to become ethnocentric to the detriment of entire peoples and continents. This we have seen again and again, and the rhetoric of politicians and political leaders around the world today is reminiscent of past turbulent times. From the invention of the whe...

The Beatles had it right from the git-go: Love is all you need. An early American promoter of Love Is All You Need was actually the first woman to run for president of the United States. No, it wasn’t Hillary Clinton! Victoria Woodhull was a Lady of Liberty back when actual liberty was reserved for those with political power. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull ran for President of the United States, nominated by the Equal Rights Party, with Frederick Douglass as a running mate (although Douglass never acknowledged he was on the ticket). The Equal Rights party of 1872 sought to forgive and reunite the suffragists with the African American civil rights activists after the disappointing exclusion of women from protection under the 15th amendment just a few years earlier. It was a tumultuous time politically. After years fighting the same battle for universal suffrage, the 15th amendment pitted men against women. Unfortunately, and sadly, unsurprisingly,  the powers that be at the time finally...

What is the bright side to a tragically lived life, with the last 30 years spent committed to an insane asylum, only to die without your true story every being told? Finding someone almost 100 years later to tell it! I realize it sounds a bit far fetched, but that is exactly what I plan to do. The idea struck me during a tour of Flagler’s Whitehall Museum in Palm Beach. Whitehall was a wedding gift from Henry Flagler to his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, after his second wife, Ida Alice Shourds, was institutionalized in 1895. Gilded Age buffs know that the reason the Standard Oil magnate came to Florida in the first place was due to the poor respiratory health of his first wife, Mary Harkness. And that Whitehall was a gift to his young new bride Mary Lily Kenan. But little is known about his second wife Ida Alice, and her brief marriage to Flagler between the two Marys. The docent led us up the staircase of the Grand Hall to the second floor exhibits informing us that “after the death of...

Grit, resilience and rugged individualism are components of our collective American identity. We are warned that replacing “picking ourselves up by our bootstraps” with participation trophies and helicopter parenting has robbed this generation of the skills needed to succeed in a ‘dog eat dog’ world. To an extent that may be true. But is that the kind of world we necessarily want to live in? Can’t humans evolve from this Darwinian way of relating to one where allowing ourselves to be helped by others in times of weakness is a strength that propels all of us to a brighter future? An eternal optimist at best, and a bit ‘Pollyanna’ at worst, I realize this thesis leaves me open to criticism from those who will accurately point out the historical evidence to the contrary. Evidence to the tune of about the past, say…. forever years. But I love to imagine the possibilities of a compassionate, tolerant, nay, accepting, free-from-fear civilization where mutual respect for our differences trans...