At five years of age, Kikuko Otake, along with her two brothers and young mother, survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan living just a little more than one mile from the hypocenter. In the first half of her book, Masako’s Story, she shares her mother’s account. “The rain soaked us to the skin. You began to shake, And grew pale....

I have never read a first person account so painful and powerful, yet so important to our future about an issue that hangs over all of us to this day. From the first words of prose-poetry (the book’s entire narrative is written in free-verse), I could not stop reading. It was shortly before 8:15 a.m., Monday, August 6, 1945 in...

My opponent and I slowly walked to our lecterns. While I was confident of my argument, I was nervous for the simple reason that this was my first debate and I had absolutely no idea how my audience would react, much less what kinds of questions would come in the second part. The topic was “Television in the Classroom” and...

“There are no easy answers’,” Ronald Reagan used to say, “but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.” There is moral right and moral righteousness. And there are far too many in Congress who act from the later and not enough of the former who are willing to stand up...

Fifty years ago, I came to Mr. Freeman’s freshman Algebra class struggling to understand little x’s and y’s. The Cuban Missile Crisis came into all of our living rooms at a time when the term “Special Bulletin” meant something more significant than “Breaking News.” For thirteen days, two nations stood on the verge of nuclear war and while I was...

At the end of July, before two political conventions and, I’ve lost count of how many negative campaign ads and divisive comments about the current state of our Union, I wrote how Abraham Lincoln, on March 4, 1861, stood on the steps of a U.S. Capitol building still under construction and spoke words of reconciliation and hope. Lincoln was so hated by...

This will be my last commentary until September, but before I go, some final thoughts. While Congress and the country seem to be both divided and divisive, there is much that we should reflect on during this long, hot summer. The chaos and slaughter in the Middle East has come about due to a lack of freedom and basic human...

Political pundits and experts love to predict. In the case of conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, it would seem all the experts had a better chance of going to their local carnival, dropping a nickel in Mr. Predicto, and reading the response on air from that little pop-out card. When it came down to a final decision on President...

Attending a party on the Fourth of July, I spent some time listening on the edge of conversations, much of which were about politics. “I don’t understand,” one fellow says, “how the government can send Martha Stewart to prison for insider trading when all those folks on Capitol Hill, who never had a pot to piss in, are all millionaires...

Watergate — a name forever synonymous with former President Richard M. Nixon. Forty years ago this month, I was glued to the TV watching the Senate Watergate Committee hearings, and astounded at the laundry list of accusations made against then President Nixon that would eventually lead to his resignation – something no one could ever imagine, let alone see come to...