1. The only way out is to admit you are part of the great problem.
2. I think the reason we like sad songs is becuase they are in sync with the longing we all have for something beyond what we have experienced. As a believer in the gospel, I think that longing will only be satisfied in the restoration of all things. But we all are drawn to those songs because we know things are not what they are supposed to be.
3. In a protest culture, people’s convictions on an issue will be gauged by what they say about an issue on social media.
4. Every time I go to the used bookstore, I visit the small back corner where the poetry section is. If I’m lucky, there will be book there I’ll want enough to buy. Yesterday, there were about a dozen. Hall, Heaney, Milosz, Oliver, Collins, Ferlinghetti… The joy of the hard choice.
5. When you eat Thai food in a gas station and it’s the best you’ve ever had.
6. I still find it hard to take seriously the praise of conservatives for Trump and the criticism of liberals. Conservatives, who thought Clinton was disqualified because of his womanizing, now praise a man who owns strip clubs. Liberals simply have regained a critical voice after losing one for a president that used drones to kill men and women overseas. I am convinced that increasingly no one has convictions beyond the conviction that the other side is wrong.
7. 1984 is the wrong book. Brave New World is what everyone should read. Everyone is worried about politicians. I’m worried about a culture drowning in Applebee’s and laugh tracks.
8. Baseball season with the green and brown and the crack of the bat and the wind ups and hot dogs and keeping score and leisure enjoyment and “birds on the bat” and dusk descending and the heat giving way to the night and field under lights and the joy of a double and the heartbreak of an RBI single.
9. Alison Krauss singing “Windy City.” Or anything.
10. One of those small things that no one ever tells you will be meaningful when you are young is the quiet joy of sitting across the table from the one you love.
Echoes and Stars 
A hearty amen to #10 !
Thank you for #6.
Amen to #1! This would solve A LOT of issues/situations, etc
#4 – about poetry – this quote has piqued my interest in poetry – “Poetry, lyric poetry anyway, is perhaps the ideal literary form for our time, as long as we rid ourselves of the notion that poems can be made sense of in a single reading.”
Jacobs, Alan. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Kindle Locations 1238-1239). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
I agree with statement wholeheartedly
I completely agree with you on #3, but what do you say to people who think you don’t care about these issues because you’re not out protesting and making a scene? Is it even worth arguing with them?
Nope. Never worth it.