In America, what awaits us as we age is not a national health system that honors the accomplishment of living long but one full of holes that often prey on the elderly.
The Double Bind of Living a Long Time in America
Columns
The Impact of Pollution on Public Health
It’s not going too far to say that the environment of the modern world is a chaos of human-caused pollution — from plastics, industrial solvents, radioactive contamination, pesticides, mercury and continent-sized islands of waste in the oceans to CO2 and methane in the atmosphere, fumes from household cleaners, oil and gasoline in aquifers, hormones in […]
Is Optimism a Necessary Mental State to Cultivate on the Verge of Dire Times?
It’s not Pollyannaish to say “yes” to a form of practical optimism when the world’s been given a near-fatal diagnosis of economic enfeeblement and overwhelming human tragedy and displacement caused by climate change. Pessimism is a paralytic agent. It’s worse than any dire prognosis itself. It’s like being a fly bitten by a spider, rendered […]
FIVE LOVE POEMS FOR THANKSGIVING 2018
by V. B. Price HONESTY IS THE WILDNESS OF THE SEA Plagues of anger choke the streets inflaming and distending everyone. Hector’s dead. Andromache’s collapsed. Safety is a hoax. Corpses aren’t secure. Only you for me, the warmth of your mind, the breezes your courage attracts, only you and I together relieve the fever from […]
Is New Mexico Still a Political Bellwether State
The sweeping repudiation of President Trump and his Republican allies in the midterm elections in New Mexico two weeks ago gives a lot of us a renewed sense of optimism about the efficiency and campaign strategy of the Democratic Party here. This was as thorough a political thumping as one could imagine. This is especially […]
From LUCRETIUS AND THE LOGIC OF VENUS
A poem by V.B. Price Most all of us have lives that are like a history of breezes moving through the leaves. They happened. Some of us wrote poems, some read charred papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum, some tortured patriotically, some were wispy and tough and played the viola, others lectured, were soldiers, changed diapers, cooked […]
Bringing Out the Worst In Us
It’s a terrible thing to think that the leader of our country brings out the worst in us and stifles and demeans the best. But that’s where the hate speech, the bombastic demeanor and draconian policies of Donald Trump and his administration have taken us — to a hate-soiled nadir that we have not seen […]