The Road to Farley is Less Traveled

I've been thinking a lot about the fragility of life the past few days. How you can wake up one day thinking it is a normal day and by day's end your world has been turned upside down. An instant -- an infinitesimal space of time; especially a point in time separating two states. A former co-worker, just 44 years old and the father of three young boys, dies of a heart attack at work during a team building activity. It was his boys' first day of school. A young woman, set to begin her senior year in high school, dies when she loses control of her scooter. Some say she was momentarily distracted by a friend who honked and waved at her. Her mother, suffering from pancreatic cancer, dies just ten days later. A young man and father of a baby girl is shot to death in circumstances that are not yet clear. In each case, one moment these individuals were full of life and hopes and dreams for the future. In an instant, their lives ended leaving spouses, parents, children, gra...

On my way home from work tonight, there was a story on NPR about a speech Robert F. Kennedy made in South Africa in 1966. A new documentary, RFK in the Land of Apartheid: Ripple of Hope , is set to air on PBS later this month.   Whenever I hear speeches made by the late Senator Kennedy, I marvel not only at his engaging speaking abilities, but am inspired by the thought provoking and forward thinking ideas he espoused during the turbulent times of the 1960s. Kennedy opened his speech at the University of Cape Town with these words: I came here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-17th century, then taken over by the British and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land wh...