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At times, due to the widening gap between Belief and Action, I tone down the Left side of the equation albeit still reaching. Who wouldn’t want to live a fuller version of the ideal self? Getting things done. Praised by the people. Projects completed, under promised and over delivered. As it turns out, with so…
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1949 in Taiwan. 1963 in S. Vietnam. 1972 in the Philippines. 2024 in S. Korea. US allies cling to power by declaring Martial Law. All from Asia, where face-saving as King Midas phrased it:” all made of blood and illusion”. Given this uncompromising reality, we live on an imperfect world, at the fork of lesser…
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We’ve been dreaming, sleepwalking to avoid our reality of war and strife. As in “Don’t dream it’s over”, we skip the front page and go right to the TV page. Amuse ourselves to death. Why not. It’s “free” (paid for by programmatic advertisers). In modern parlance, it means to click on YouTube page – our…
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Anthropologists recently discovered in ancient Kenya two sets of footprints – both placed in the same time span. Conclusion: people of differences co-existed. Yes, they were different. Yes, homo sapiens survived violent upheavals (man-made) and evolutionary challenges (nature causes). It doesn’t always have to be homogeneity (in group) since each group contains intra-DNA differences (in…
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Unlike Pyle the quiet American (Brendan Fraser also in George the Jungle and the Scout), his Vietnamese counterpart – our fictional Phuc – is truly quiet. He wouldn’t venture out to dance nor to make waves. Not good to draw attention to oneself until and unless looking anti-social in a socially mediated society (odd man…
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I am slow to catch on. Always have been… trailing behind much older sibling and parent. When I barely attended school, they had already hummed: “Tout les garcons et les filles de mon age se promene dans la rue…et les yeux dand les yeux”. I stayed home, alone, with just a ball for company. Later,…
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Ron Nessen, Press Secretary during the Ford Administration, mentioned in “Making the News Taking the News” that a Vietnamese lady holding her battered child in front of the camera, begging public opinion to do something. A sense of helplessness stayed with him for years to come, Other images from the last days of Saigon showing…
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Hope first. Or else. What’s the point! Hope, my first thought. There at the moment I bathed in maternal-ward fluorescent light and friendly faces. “Wow, she was 40 something yet while pregnant with child , she still juggled in between a class – 57 students – to push through nine-months of carrying”. Flanked by love,…
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1975-1985 For context and contrast, he was just as tall as McNamara without the glasses yet with trench coat and slick-back hair. We did not go deep-sea fishing for father-son outing. He only spent Sunday mornings with me. Our routine. His afternoons were for the other, his second wife and child. So I grew up,…
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Among them, besides two set of clothes, was my birthday’s gift: a Collegiate Dictionary. For the love of words and of a world that has yet to be discovered. It’s as it is today, slightly cool and conducive to sleeping-in. Yet I needed to show up for a rendezvous: my fateful trip to State College.…
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Thang Nguyen 555 