Tower Grove Park in St. Louis: A Way to Celebrate Each Other Despite COVID

I'm repeatedly falling in love with Tower Grove Park, which is a short walking distance from my home in the near south side of St. Louis. At the TGP website, one can read: "The mission of Tower Grove Park is to be an exemplary, well-preserved and well-presented, wooded Victorian park of international significance . . . " Absolutely true.  I took these photos tonight to offer you the opportunity to see why I tend to exude over the top when talking about TGP.  The sun was setting as I took these photos; there is no time of day when this park fails to inspire.  I avoided invading the privacy of the people in these photos, but even total darkness is not a reason to leave for many of them.

While COVID keeps wearing us down, a newfound appreciation for magic places like TGP is a silver lining: People from the surrounding neighborhoods are increasingly celebrating this park. I never seen so many families using the park. Friends gather at a distance under the gazebos or on picnic blankets. It is a sacred place of peaceful celebration. No matter what day it is, I am likely to think of that classic Chicago tune, "Saturday in the Park." It is impossible to walk through TGP without soaking in upbeat social vibes from a vibrant melting pot of people representing numerous languages and demographics. I speak for all of my neighbors when I say: This upbeat diversity is why I live in this neighborhood.

That TGP serves as such a respite from COVID is not a surprise. TGP's 289 acres are covered with more than 7,000 gorgeous trees. You can easily and safely social distance from many hundreds of people in such a vast area. BTW, Central Park in NYC is 840 acres, which is smaller than the biggest park in St. Louis, Forest Park, with 1326 acres.

I try to get at least one long brisk walk every day in Tower Grove Park. I also tend to do some of my writing on a park bench or under one of the many gazebos. Along with my own photos, I'm going to include a compilation of sketches by a lithograph company called Compton & Dry, which created a detailed drawing of the City of St. Louis in 1875, probably with the assistance of some balloon flights. In this compilation, you can see that TGP had been laid out before any of the houses in the surrounding areas were built. This is city planning at its best, thanks to a man named Henry Shaw, who donated this land to the City of St. Louis in 1866.

That's it for now, my Ode to Tower Grove Park. I hope that you too are finding relief from COVID, at least once in a while, by reconnecting with your community at your neighborhood parks.

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Brett Weinstein’s Podcast Hosts Roundtable of Black Writers and Intellectuals

Based on the protests raging on the streets, one might mistakenly think that there is only Black viewpoint and that it is represented by the purported political aims of Black Lives Matter.

Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist who, on his DarkHorse Podcast, has made a habit of doing deep dives into thorny topics. On this episode, Weinstein hosts a roundtable with seven highly accomplished Black writers and intellectuals. If you like good-natured self-critical discussions where the facts matter and where the participants actively seek to learn from each other, you are going to find this two-hour discussion fascinating. I found myself taking notes throughout and having my faith in humanity restored as this lively discussion unfolded.

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The Gift of a Heart

I love these images. The father of a girl who donated her heart is offered the chance to hear his daughter's heart again. Try to imagine someone seeing this video 100 years ago, wondering how the this story could be possibly be true. When I saw the stethoscope come out, that when I started feeling emotionally flooded by this video.

Bill Conner of Wisconsin rode his bicycle 2600 miles across the country to honor his daughter and raise awareness about the importance of organ, eye and tissue donation. Bill’s daughter, Abbey, died in January of 2017. She was an organ donor. On Father’s Day 2017, Bill heard his daughter’s heart beat again. After biking 1400 miles through several states, Conner stopped in Ventress, Louisiana to meet his daughter’s heart recipient, Loumonth Jack, Jr

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The Two Starkly Different Meanings of “Black Lives Matter,” and Political Ideas That Must Never Be Criticized

"Black Lives Matter" is a simple looking phrase, but it functions as a Trojan Horse. Many people don't understand that there is a big difference between A) stating the obvious fact that Black lives do, indeed, matter and B) embracing the controversial political agenda of the Black Lives Matter organizations. Just because one believes A doesn't necessarily mean that one believes B, but this conflation flies under the radars of many people who embrace both A and B even though the only part that they have carefully considered is A.

Consider this excerpt from a recent news article about Nick Buckley, a man who has spent many years of his life helping desperate others through a charity he founded in 2011, Mancunian Way, based in Manchester, England. The problem started when Nick dared to write an article:

In the article the 52-year-old started by saying: “Of course black lives matter. Let’s get this obvious point over and done with at the beginning”, but went on to criticise the political agenda of the organisation BLM which sought to repudiate the values expressed by Martin Luther King.

I am sympathetic to Nick Buckley's clearly stated concerns. Like Buckley, I am concerned that some of the political ends of BLM sharply conflict with the wisdom of Martin Luther King. The fact that Nick Buckley dared to speak up about this critical issue cost him his job and that is a tragedy.

In some circles, the phrase "Black Lives Matter" has taken on the status of an unassailable fundamentalist religion, which is extremely unfortunate. Whenever this phrase is uttered, we should be asking whether the speaker is asserting A, B or both A and B.  Whereas A is self-evident truth to me, B is a complex set of ideas, many of them ill-defined and/or problematic.

Every idea, especially every political idea, should be open to vigorous criticism and discussion. There should be no exceptions, for the reasons carefully stated by John Stuart Mill in his work, On Liberty. To every claim I respond: "Let's test it." To the extent that any ideas are declared to be sacrosanct, off-limits to discussion and criticism based on science, statistical analyses and the diverse wisdom collected by thinking people from the beginning of time, our democracies are dead.

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