Author: Henry Barnard

I am a voracious reader and also enjoy writing. I often have a very different point of view than the popular one. I do see value in debate, and thought it might add to the public debate on controversial issues if I were to express my contrarian opinions. I also started keeping my poems recently (I've written little pieces my whole adult life but never kept any); and I've been a photographer now for over 25 years. So I will be adding an occasional poem and hopefully interesting photograph to the blog along the way, just to spice things up.

Atlanta, Ga.

An amazing and vibrant city with new development all over the place.  The Beltline walkway has obviously spurred much of this growth.  New apartment building everywhere, probably because of the large college student population but also all the Yuppies.

There’s a very convenient subway system (MARTA) that can reach 7 miles in any direction.  A perhaps unique aspect of the city is that you have many residential communities that come right up to the edge of the central part of the city, certainly within walking distance of what they call Midtown.

Downside: there are many unemployed backs in the streets and some tent cities underneath highway bridges and subway overpasses — a clear subclass of homeless. There are some very aggressive black panhandlers off the side streets in the Downtown area.

Quite the contrast between the rich with their million dollar high-rise apartments and this segment of the population that is dispossessed, not to mention the contrast between the many urbane black professionals you see in the city and those idle blacks in the streets with nothing to do, who are restive if not desperate.

Nevertheless, given how dynamic this city is, if I had been in charge of the Amazon decision where to locate, it wouldn’t have been a difficult choice.

My Story

Character Assassination

The Left goes after anyone they disagree with by calling them a Nazi or a racist or Right Wing — or all of the above.  The tactic has become very obvious.  And of course this includes the media — in fact, the media is a driving force behind this baleful tactic, not to mention academia as well.

But the truth is there are relatively few American Nazis, and they are held in contempt as a lunatic fringe by the general public.  Also, the number of actual racists in the country is also relatively small — certainly nothing compared to the number of racists in the 50s and early 60s.  In fact, the overwhelming majority of sane Americans readily see the justice of equal opportunity for all races, so the use of the racist slur by the Left is particularly lame.

Then there is the slur that with your contrarian and conservative views, you are actually a member of the Right Wing.  The myriad people the Left associates with the so-called Right Wing is in fact growing by leaps and bounds — witness the #walkaway movement. But their “crime” isn’t that these contrarians are far right of center, but that their thinking contradicts some of the more lunatic ideological ideas of the Left taken to extremes.

My Story

 

 

 

 

 

True Love

Holding hands,

An elderly couple

Walks slowly through the park.

Like a bee hovering momentarily over flowers,

The couple stops now and then

To share comments about this and that,

Savoring the nectar,

Then moves on to the next attraction,

To the next blossom,

Unhurried, self-contained, free.

 

All around the couple,

Singles clutch their cell phones,

Ever impatient to be elsewhere.

All Poetry — Henry Barnard

My Story

 

Capitalism

Capitalism is the only economic system that produces any value, in the form of new products and new services and all the employment necessary to produce those products and services.

But you do need some government oversight.  Private companies are driven by their financial self-interest, not the public good.  A company will sell you arsenic if they can make a profit and think they can get away with it.  So that’s where government comes in — a watchdog to make capitalism benign instead of predatory.

My Story