When a man plans, a woman laughs.

John flung himself into a pseudo-karate stance, one hand poised behind him and one in front, posed like a cartoon cactus. I thought for an odd moment he had moved his limbs so fast they had made that whoosh sound through air but then I realized John was making that sound with his mouth.

The demonization of Islam and immigrants shows that perception of difference remains one of our biggest problems, and maybe always will be for a species that began in small groups competing with other groups for resources. These apparently competing forces for sameness and difference sometimes even seem to be mutually reinforcing. The homogenizing force of globalization tends to make many people feel they are on the losing side, economically and culturally, and it is they who are most easily turned against those "others" who are demonized by demagogues.

Accommodation is a willingness to maintain constructive relationship with others with whom one is in serious and even intractable disagreement. Social cooperation would come under impossible pressure if it always depended on strict agreement.

Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.

My own sense as an American is that we have begun to experience the disadvantages of framing virtually all moral issues in terms of individual rights. American history has consisted of swings back and forth between rights talk on the one hand and talk of duties, responsibilities, and the common good on the other hand. Recent decades have seen a big swing toward rights, and conceived in very individualistic terms, which hasn't always been the case even with rights.

Children die every day because millions of us tell ourselves that caring is just as good as doing.