Right From the Hip

In which our Vagabond Seeks a City in Motion. It is early Saturday evening, the doors are open, the coffee house beckons. I enter into a crowd – young and old, in pairs, groups and singles, are standing in line, checking their phones, reviewing the menu board, sitting astride chairs, leaning on counters, stirring their mugs, contemplating their next move, and conversing with animation and verve. After securing a mug of herbal orange blossom tea and plain pound cake (something […]

Coffee House Discourse # 1, in which  a Vagabond Appears. Coffee houses are staging areas for a broad variety of activities, including rants, raves and discourses from the patrons. These spring forth, unbidden, for the benefit of anyone who happens to be sitting nearby drinking an espresso, threads in the tapestry of coffee house background ambience. No revolution was ever launched without at least one heated discussion in a coffee house or its local equivalent. In the spirit of ventilating […]

Recently, in the wake of the Parkland shootings, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the repeal of the 2nd Amendment.  Below is my posted response. The real purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to prevent the federal government from disarming the states. It was, as all the amendments comprising the Bill of Rights were, a limit on federal power, not directives or prohibitions to any state by or from […]