Jean Stimmell

Redefining Progress

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by Jean Stimmell Driving to an early morning appointment in Boston, my son and I got mired in rush-hour traffic made worse by an accident: the trip took over 2 1/2 hours. Miles of backed-up cars, holding their passengers hostage in exhaust-polluted paralysis, the opposite of the sparkling air and open spaces we left behind in Northwood. It was the final straw for me. What an idiotic way to live. In that instant, I saw how absurd our modern world has become. In my mind, the main villain is our blind devotion to progress. It is, without doubt, our secular religion, preaching that our lives …

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Trump is bringing patriotism back into vogue for the rest of us

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by Jean Stimmell Winter is losing its grip. Even the chunks of snow that slid off my north-facing roof are almost gone. The daffodils have pushed up through matted oak leaves, and the ice went out early on Jenness Pond. It’s a time of renewal not only for Mother Nature but also for our democracy. Since his inauguration in January, President Trump has given it his best shot to destroy our country. But he will fail! As the opposition, we were flabbergasted by the audacity of Trump’s attacks on our Constitution and institutions starting on day one. We were initially struck dumb, but once it …

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After the Sixties, Came the Counter-Revolution

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by Jean Stimmell I was born in the 1940s and grew up in the 1950s. The ’50s was a strange chapter in American life: banal, antiseptic, and claustrophobically conformist: swearing or even mentioning sex was forbidden. If you questioned anything about America, you risked being called a Communist. That’s not just my opinion. Andrew Hartman writes that the 1950s were more coercive than before or after, exhibiting “an extraordinary degree of conformity.” “An unprecedented number of Americans got in line—or aspired to get in line—particularly white, heterosexual, Christian Americans.”⁠ 1 I rebelled: I wanted freedom! I found it as a teenager through Sigmund Freud. Through …

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Entropy has been weighing on my mind and body

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by Jean Stimmell “Even the words that we are speaking now, thieving time has stolen away, and nothing can return.” — Horace, Odes, 23 BC Watching my body fall apart at the age of 78, I can no longer ignore the fact that entropy is taking over. Entropy, of course, is the scientific fact that everything in the cosmos winds down, the universal reality that order inevitably turns toward disorder. As Carlo Rovelli has written in The Order of Time,⁠ 1 entropy is special: as opposed to all the other laws of the universe, time is not reversible. You can’t go backward. How well I …

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It All Started at Columbia

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by Jean Stimmell I need to vent about the college protests. I am beside myself, appalled at my country’s unconditional military support of Israel’s continuing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. I have first-hand knowledge about protest and war during the Vietnam era, first as a hapless bystander, then a direct participant in the war, and afterward, as a protester against the war. And it all started at Columbia. When I started at Columbia as a freshman in 1963, it still felt like the 1950s: I had to sign a loyalty oath pledging I was a loyal American, left over from the communist hysteria during the …

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Sorrow, grief, and trouble sit like vultures on my psychic fence

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by Jean Stimmell A few years ago, I photographed five vultures attempting to warm up on a cold winter morning by spreading their wings toward the sun. I am using it to illustrate this rant. The title⁠1 reflects how I feel. I can’t get images of maimed and bloody bodies out of my mind, first in Ukraine and now doubling down in Israel and Palestine. They are broadcast nonstop on the news and haunt my dreams. Especially disturbing are the corpses of dead babies. As I write this, 4104 children have been killed so far, just in Gaza, according to the United Nations.⁠2 Seeing their …

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