Elie Wiesel is a man who could have lived a life filled with anger and hatred because he was a victim of the worst kind of anger and hatred. Wiesel is probably the most famous of the Holocaust survivors. Wiesel was born in Romania in 1928. He was 15 years old when he and his father, mother, and three sisters were rounded up with his town’s other Jews and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Ninety percent of the people sent there were exterminated on arrival. Wiesel’s mother and younger sister were murdered immediately. Wiesel and his father were picked to perform manual labor as long as they could before they too would be killed. Months later they were transferred to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. In the book he later wrote, “Night”, Wiesel recalls seeing his father beaten and being unable to help him. One night he went to sleep on an upper bunk with his father sleeping below. When he awoke the next morning, there was another man in his father’s bunk. He never saw his father again.

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 I met this young girl on a recent trip to the James Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA. It was quite by accident. I was looking for something to do recently. I had been by the museum many times. So, I decided to spend a couple of hours educating myself. I’ve always been interested in art and photography. Michener, one of the great authors of the 2oth Century, was a patron of the arts and a collector. I was immediately taken in by the work of Daniel Garber. Garber was an American Impressionist known for his landscapes in and around New Hope and Bucks County Pennsylvania. Most of his work did not include images of people. Obviously, one caught my eye.

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It’s the most notorious crime scene in modern American history. It reaches from the window of a non-descript warehouse building to the street below, and what happened there changed our country and all of our lives forever. It came without warning and lasted just a few seconds. But its impact horrified us, brought us to tears, and took away our innocence. The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, Texas preserves the place and tries to explain what happened on that sunny day in November when a young, vibrant president was gunned down on a street in the middle of an American city as cheering crowds watched.

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They were intelligent, athletic, attractive, and fully engaged in life. They didn’t know each other. Two lived in rural middle America, one in Washington DC. They were doing what was an important part of their lives. Two were out for a run. One was on a golf course. They had no reason to suspect they would never make it home. They had their whole lives ahead of them. It seems likely they would have had successful lives and careers and made the world a better place. But the dark hand of fate would place them in the wrong place, at the wrong time. What happened to them was eerily similar. It could have happened to any of us, and we should all mourn their loss.

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It’s a box usually buried at the bottom of the sports pages called “This Date in Baseball.” It’s something only real sports nerds or historians would take the time to read. In tiny print, it lists what happened in baseball on that day in history. This weekend I glanced  down the list of things that happened on September 9th. Something suddenly jumped out at me as I read down the list. There were four no-hitters thrown on this date. One of them was a perfect game. Now, no-hitters don’t happen everyday. Since the modern era of baseball started in 1901, there have been 256. There have only been 23 official perfect games going back 140 years , including years before the modern era. I don’t know what the odds are that four of them would be thrown on the same date, but the sports historian in me, and the need to know what many might feel is useless information, I had to find out more.

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I wonder what if it had been me? I was an altar boy from 1959 to 1964. I attended a large Catholic elementary school in one of the largest parishes in Brooklyn, New York. It was so big, we had a bishop as our pastor with about five priests working under him. You felt special being an altar boy. This was before the changes of Vatican II. We would have weekly meetings in the church before school to learn the Latin responses for mass. We could carrying our cassocks and surpluses to school if we had an early weekday mass, or had to leave class to serve a funeral mass. We sometimes got tips from the families for those. I remember a couple of bus trips to the old Madison Square Garden to see a New York Ranger hockey game. We had a big, young athletic priest who as in charge of the altar boys. I heard he was a pretty good basketball player. We all thought it was an innocent time. We now know evil was lurking then, and for decades before and after, when some of the very men we held above all reproach, were committing unspeakable crimes against children like me, and their superiors were covering it up. I often think was I just lucky it didn’t happen to me.

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I’ve spent my life reading. When I started out in school, I wasn’t a good speller. I used to get nervous before spelling tests. But, my spelling got better as I learned to read. It’s such an important part of everyday life. No one can remember when they couldn’t read. Being a journalist, I spent my career reading and writing everyday. Reading is the foundation of all knowledge. It helps us write better, explore and understand the world around us. It takes us to places we’d never get a chance to visit and introduces us to people we would never have the opportunity to meet. It expands our minds to new ideas and opinions and makes us crave more. You can find a book on just about every subject you can imagine.

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It was one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century. Delivered at the right time, in the right place, by the right person. It was sunny and hot 55 years ago, on August 28, 1963 when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech to 250,000 people, and the world, while standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The civil rights movement was gaining momentum. But it would mark the beginning of dramatic change and upheaval in American society. Just over two weeks after the speech, members of the Ku Klux Klan would bomb the black 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls. Less than three months later, President Kennedy would be assassinated. Racial unrest would rage across the country for years, burning cities and killing many. Less than five years later, King himself would be a victim of violence that he spent his life preaching against.

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The people in charge say there are too many rules and regulations. That includes the rules to safeguard the world around us. We are pulling out of the Paris Climate agreement. We had a guy in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency who wanted to eliminate many of the rules to protect clean air and water to satisfy the oil and gas industry, and a Secretary of the Interior who helped shrink some National Monument areas by thousands of acres. It hasn’t stopped. The same people are proposing legislation and amendments to cut back and weaken the Endangered Species Act. The Act, passed in 1973, was designed to save and protect wildlife that had been ravaged by man. It has saved the very symbol of our country, the bald eagle. But dozens of species of animals, birds, alligators, insects, and plants have been brought back to thrive from near extinction.

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Journalists are suppose to be fair, even handed, and even dispassionate. They have to defend their work when challenged. That has never been truer than today when journalists have been called “the enemy of the people” and purveyors of “fake news”. This past week was the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg which turned the tide of the Civil War. The New York Times reprinted an account of the battle by their Washington Bureau Chief Sam Wilkeson Jr. who was one of the most respected correspondents of his time. The battle raged for three bloody days, and determined the future of the country. But, the story of a lifetime became much more for Wilkeson. His 19 year old son, Lt. Bayard Wilkeson was in command of a Union artillery battery.

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