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.

Steppin’ Out

steppinout

My Story

What do you get for a one dollar contribution? My gratitude.

If you enjoyed the post, you can help me keeping blogging along with just a one dollar contribution. You can contribute more by increasing the quantity — each increase by 1 is an additional dollar. Thanks for your support in this blog-eat-blog world.

$1.00

Road Rage

You have heard the awful stories recounted many times. Someone loses control to road rage and shoots and kills another driver or some variation with the same outcome — one man, incensed, murders another, a total stranger, with no reasonable justification.

And our common reaction to this scenario is stark horror that anyone could be so cruel as to willfully murder a perfect stranger that way. But I would submit the murderer is also a victim here. The roads are really a disaster lying in wait for the next impatient driver, and we are all that impatient driver — we are all in a hurry to get where we are going fast, and yet the roads are often filled beyond their capacity, particularly at rush hour. So they are a trap waiting in the wings for all of us — we are all susceptible to being swept away by road rage, this very modern form of demented behavior.

The Roman philosopher and politician Lucius Annaeus Seneca noticed that there was an inordinate amount of anger at the street level in overcrowded Rome. So he pondered to himself the philosophical question, Why are people so damn angry? His answer: They do not anticipate difficulties very well, that is, they assume that doing just about everything will be more or less effortless and without problems, which very clearly is often not the case. Thus the anger.

Fast forward 2,000 years to modern American and its high-speed highways and byways, which are frequently packed with vehicles where slow downs and even total blockages are frequent events. Add to that mix that there are drivers with very different skill levels and that many drive at reckless speeds, with very reckless tactics. Needless to say, such a mixture is loaded with potential problems for virtually everyone who gets behind the wheel.

So a word of advice — road rage is not something that impacts only the mentally unstable. Given just the right set of difficulties and circumstances, it can get under your skin as well because, as Seneca noted, we do not anticipate difficulties very well, and yet our highways and byways are loaded with them, even extremely hazardous ones. If you drive at all, you are not immune to this modern demented behavior, so don’t assume that you are.

My Story

What do you get for a one dollar contribution? My gratitude.

$1.00

Central Park Escape

centralparkescape

Manhattan, A Photographer’s Journey by Henry Barnard

My Story

What do you get for a one dollar contribution? My gratitude.

$1.00

9/11 — Coming Down the Stairwell

Henry's Views

wtcandbrooklynbridge

I stepped off the elevator on the 71^st floor of 1 World Trade Center only seconds before the first airplane hit. There was one person, a young man, still on the elevator when the doors closed.

The airplane jolted the building in such a sharp fashion that I lost my balance. I recall having the thought it was pointless to react to the lurch in the building because if the building went over, I was dead anyway.

Only a few feet from the elevator, I was standing near a stairwell entrance, which was situated next to the entrance to my department. A consultant I knew ran out of the department entrance, dashed to the stairwell door, and opened it hastily. As he did so, I asked him what he was doing, and he said he had been here in ’93 and was getting the hell out. Still stunned, I…

View original post 899 more words

Is the Democratic Party Coming Apart?

The big political story in the United States is becoming less and less about the various bogus political attacks against Trump, and more and more about the splintering of the Democratic Party into two mutually distinct and potentially incompatible camps — the traditional Democrats (who have held power) and the so-called “progressive” wing of the party whose members tout themselves as “socialists”. The fissure between the two groups is growing larger and larger, to the point where one might conjecture a complete rupture of the party where the progressives break off to form their own new party.

My Story