Here in the place where I live, the population is old. That’s the nature of life in a retirement village. But none of us were always old. We have been places and done things. We have stories to tell. Lately I have been asked by several different groups to talk about what is happening in […]
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On the day I intended to post this blog I named it “Happy Hiroshima Day.” It was August 6, the birthday of my eldest daughter and the 70th anniversary of the day America, sweet land of liberty, dropped an atom bomb. But on that day I could neither finish nor post the blog because a […]
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Suddenly, or so it appears to people on the outside, Lebanon has a problem with garbage. Just one day the garbage trucks didn’t come. The dumpsters were full and overflowing, and people were throwing bags of rotting stuff out on the curbs. Pictures of heaped up debris appeared in the papers for the world to […]
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In its precarious position in the middle of the great upheaval of the Middle East, Lebanon faces four serious threats. (1) ISIS, ubiquitous and brutal, on its eastern border and infiltrating its cities. The Lebanese Army has already faced it. Soldiers have been captured, some have been beheaded. To make this really complicated, ISIS is […]
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On what do you base your hope for Lebanon? At Elon University a student from Lebanon asked me this excellent question. I did not do a great job of answering, though I did say that the Lebanese people are amazingly resilient. They are survivors. They have an uncanny ability to get around a problem without […]
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In my book there is a story called “John and Elena.” Elena was a pretty young Lebanese woman, a friend of ours. John was an American Marine from Minnesota. The two of them were the poignant center of my account of an event that shook both Lebanon and America and has not ended even yet. […]
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January 20, 2015 Today’s news from the Middle East resonates powerfully with emotional memories for people who lived in Lebanon during the era of In Borrowed Houses, and illustrates the way current events are the down-stream flow of what happened in the past. The Beirut Daily Star tells me that early today a sea of […]
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