Marshall's Blog

     There has been a rift created between two complementary actions, support and accountability. Normally these go hand in hand, but lately they have been made by a part of our society to be total and complete opposites. On Facebook you can like a post, love, wow, cry, and angry a post, but recently they created a new button on the reactions as a response to the pandemic and that is the care button. The care button is a virtual hug, I am not sure the exact amount of comfort the "virtual hug" gives, but am certain it varies to the person receiving it and the person reacting with it. There were outbursts of sarcasm and anger that accompanied the addition of one small reaction emoticon, there were joke made, and there was applause. The different reactions paints an interesting portrayal of where we are at as a society.       A friend of mine last week posted about a death in the family and had to preface the post with instructions on what she was looking...

     We are currently in the middle of Hanukkah 2020 and while this holiday always seemed to me as an exotic and odd form of Christmas growing up, and was seemingly only marked by those that had a dark house on Christmas save a menorah in the window sill. Hanukkah is the festival of lights that is a Holiday that was added to the feast of tables because of a very poignant story to the point that we find ourselves today. The miracle that spurred and found the celebration of Hanukkah as it exists today came at the end of the Maccabean Revolt. During the Maccabean Revolt the Jewish people successfully gained a short term freedom from the Seleucid Empire. They wished to rededicate their temple, which required Eight Days of worship and burning of lamps. They only had a days worth of oil in their lamps. God allowed for the lamps to burn all eight days despite the lack of oil. They had fought hard through a particularly difficult revolt and faced impossible odds and certainly kne...

 Starting at Christmas Eve December 24th, 1914 the British and German soldiers in the trenches at Flanders and Normandy began to realize something was going on. Silence ensued as arms were laid down during the realizations that every soldier would be spending Christmas in hell. Lights were being lit in barbed wire, carols were beginning to be sung in native tongues and Christmas Trees began to appear on both fronts and hundreds of soldiers poured out into no-man's land. One can imagine that this was the first time in months the sky was cleared of smoke to see the stars, and the fog of conflict would be clear for a short miracle. Suddenly the truth of their situation became clear. They were men who loved their countries, men who fought to protect their families, men who had no say to move the front back or forward by so much as an inch, they were not enemies, not really. It seems that it is easier to harbor hatred when the stakes are lower, and great violence and loss can serve to c...

      Growing up I wasn't much of an athlete. Sure I did some pee wee sports like baseball and football, but they never really stuck well with me. I remember wishing that physical activities were optional as they really didn't capture my imagination and frankly I struggled with them as an overweight asthmatic kid. One of the more daunting days of physical education or sports was conditioning, or for the purposes of this essay the run a mile day. For some of you this may not seem like much, but for me the prospect of not one or two laps around the track, but FOUR was exasperating to consider. But I refused to give up and face the shame of walking with the other "fat" kids. I didn't run fast but I jogged a bit in ebbs and flows of slowing speed. I would turn my brain off and try not to think of the things I would rather be doing, most of which involve sitting and thinking.       But something would happen in me when I reached the last lap. I'm not s...