Can it be autumn already? The Autumnal equinox happened this Wednesday the 21st, and I am once again reflecting on why I love this season so much. If spring is the season of young men’s fancies, autumn is the season of older men’s bittersweet memories. Decades ago, I first fell in love in this season. […]
Matt Talbot: Catastrophe and community; Reflections on the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm
Almost exactly 25 years ago, in October of 1991, I was living in a small apartment in the Rockridge district of Oakland, right at the base of the hills. I had just started a new job, and had rented an apartment on the third floor of a building that was about a 25 minute walk […]
Matt Talbot: Reflections on two long wars
This coming Sunday will be the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It is hard to believe that 15 years have come and gone since that terrible morning in September of 2001. I awoke that morning to a world that seemed unmoored from any reference point of understanding, any prior experience in my life. The […]
Matt Talbot: The task before the Republican Party
Given the chaos consuming the Republican Party in the wake of Donald Trump’s nomination this year, I think future historians will write about the 2016 presidential election as the year the Republican Party’s internal contradictions finally came to the surface and consumed the party from the inside, leaving it an all-but-empty shell. The Republican Party […]
Matt Talbot: Life, death and middle age
“The word nostalgia is learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of nóstos, meaning ‘homecoming,’ a Homeric word, and álgos, meaning ‘pain, ache’” –Wikipedia Nostalgia is the besetting fault of middle age, and I am not immune to infection by its sweet melancholy. I sometimes find myself driving by my old middle school in the […]
Matt Talbot: Repenting of our ‘original sin’
As measured in terms of both loss of life and physical destruction, the U.S. Civil War was by far the most devastating ever prosecuted by the United States. More Americans died in that war than died in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – combined. The total number of dead […]
Matt Talbot: One black life that mattered
Two of my best friends growing up in Richmond were the Stanley brothers, Sertha and Ray. Sertha was about a year older than me (the same age as my late older brother Mark), and Ray was my age. For most of my childhood, Ray and I were inseparable. On the other side of the Southern […]
Matt Talbot: A look back at Archie Bunker and ‘The Greatest Generation’
In the early 1970s, the most popular show on television was “All in the Family,” a sitcom produced by legendary writer and producer Norman Lear. The show traced the ups and downs of the Bunker family, and was a groundbreaking show for its day. While sitcoms in the 1960s – shows like “Gilligan’s Island,” “Bewitched” […]
Matt Talbot: Some thoughts on Black Lives Matter
A common objection I have heard to the Black Lives Matter movement is, “Well, don’t ALL lives matter?” The thing is, I doubt very many people in the movement would disagree with that. In fact, that is the point of the movement: that all lives, including black lives, matter. A few years ago, a woman […]
Matt Talbot: Crime, fear and reality
On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump posted the following on his Twitter account: “Crime is out of control, and rapidly getting worse. Look what is going on in Chicago and our inner cities. Not good!” Something about that didn’t seem right, so I checked crime statistics for both Chicago and for the nation as a whole. […]