A Day in the Life of Chaos

Road trips, especially in the Mountain and Southwest states always serve to remind me how big America is.  In the past days I have been on a journey that has taken me from Oregon to Texas.  Along the way we passed through some of the most beautiful landscape America has to offer stopping over in Canyonlands, Arches and Mesa Verde National Parks.  America’s National Parks are the jewels of the nation.  They are precious monuments to a wild and beautiful unsettled land.   Two guys at Mesa Verde, National Park As the miles slip away and we wind our way through miles of land with scarcely a single human present it reminds one of how empty and unsettled America is.  The tiny farm towns we cross through are monuments to the past and decaying representations of the present.  What little remains of a Main Street is often fronted by a few beautiful old brick buildings long since abandoned.  It makes me wonder how they ever served as a commercial center but I suppose in the era of Amazon they ar

Goonies Like many in America and pr obably the world I recently spent a chunk of time binge watching Netflix season 3 of “Stranger Things.”  It's a fun show that most directly in my mind connects me to the “Goonies” a kind of seminal experience of my child hood.  It came out in 1985 just as I was graduating high school and while most of the kids depicted were a tad younger than I, it still seemed to somehow frame my own childhood.  Maybe it was a last grasp at being young.   “Stranger Things” harkens back to the same time period in its depiction of average American kids battling the evils of the world or in the case of “Stranger Things,” another world.  On the surface I find the plot doesn’t capture as much of me as the depiction of suburban America in the late 1970’s and 80’s.  The time that was mine.  The show does an amazing job of capturing the nuance of the time.  From music to iconic events and images.  It touches on the heartbeat of what it was to be a child during

When an American looks at Asia they often view the region as one big exotic place filled with people that look the same and are all sort of “Chinese.”  It is only after you live or travel here that you truly come to understand the tremendous variation between the region and its people. At times these ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious and political differences combine to make westerners seem as if they are the ones that are the same. The differences between a French, White American, German, English or Italian start to seem so small in the eyes of an Asian and we are typically racially grouped together in much the same way.  The Thais even have a word for it, Farang.  The term Farang envelopes all white skinned western folk and places them into a single class of foreigner. President Tran Dai Quang I recently completed my third trip to Vietnam, a region of the world I am still struggling to define.  The land is in a word fascinating.  It is an inconvenient land.  One tha

I have never been so worried for my country.  This is not hyperbole, it is seriously a feeling I have deep inside my gut.   At nearly 51 years of age I have lived over half a century.  While I find this thought an anathema to my feelings of youth inside, it is in fact a reality that I can now look at the world and time with a sense of perspective.   America is disintegrating before our very eyes.  Again, I don’t mean this statement to be dramatic in effect.  I simply state it as a realistic appraisal of who we are and where we are as a society.  Our value systems have become clouded and buried under a mountain of lies designed to divide and conquer.  Internationally we have never been weaker.  We as a nation are more vulnerable then we have ever been but like the Roman Empire before us we are literally rotting frown within.  We are sewing the seeds of our own destruction and no one should doubt that our enemies do not recognize this.   I have been a fighter and debater all