Editorial

Caption faux pas

It’s no surprise that young adults increasingly support gay marriage and think it’s just fine for two moms to have kids. Young people grew up with gay friends. They could have a gay stepbrother or a lesbian minister.

My wife Bonnie and I recently went to the de Young Museum to see the Vermeer (1632 - 1675) exhibit on loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The Exhibit is called “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” after what is perhaps Vermeer’s best known work. The girl turns to look at us over her left shoulder and as she turns our gaze is drawn to the single pearl on the lobe of her lovely ear. A text describes the painting as the Dutch “Mona Lisa.” The exhibit reveals a world of mostly prosperous looking men and women. Self assured, Protestant, one might even say secular. They are a class of people absent from earlier times, the early Renaissance and the Middle Ages. They are neither prelates (there is one painting of a preacher in the exhibit), nor princes, and they are certainly not peasants. They are burghers and their families, men of commerce, trade and industry; and they read and write. There is a charming, domestic scene of a woman, seated comfortably at a desk in her own home. She is writing, maybe a personal letter, maybe household accounts, but the point is she is writing, something that a few hundred years earlier few other than clergy were able to do.

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For the last 15 years, I have been a volunteer in prisons, teaching convicted felons in the field of sociology and running self-help groups. Most of my students are “lifers,” men who have been convicted of serious crimes like murder, rape, or burglary for which they have received sentences of 15 years to life and much more. None of them are on death row, and most are now eligible for parole, having served their minimum sentences. Often, they have served far longer.

Residents speak out

Not up to par

In the film “To Kill a Mockingbird” Gregory Peck explains the legacy of pocket watches passed on from father to son, and I thought how unlikely it will be that someone inherits a smart phone inscribed, “with love to my darling Atticus.”

Almost went wrong way

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