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Before my dad's tragic accident two weeks ago I thought other things mattered, like the LEARNS Act, the governor's race, and others in which I'd love to see the good guys (and gals) depose despotic leaders of our state; the Southern Baptist Convention doubling down on harmful practices regarding women, the degradation of this great country by the worst president of my lifetime and probably, hopefully, ever in our history. I was even gearing up to write something about the semiquincentennial by reflecting on the last 250 years on this piece of dirt stretching from sea to shining sea that we call the United States of America.

Then the world stopped spinning on its axis for me. I entered a state of funeral blues from which I doubt I will ever fully emerge. In the words of Auden: "He was my North, my South, my East and West, my working week and my Sunday rest. My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song."

I believe love lasts forever. But I thought I would have my father here to hug and visit and enjoy much longer, and I was wrong.

I don't care about politics or religious deconstruction or much else in this world like I did. There's a before my daddy died, the person I was then, and there is an after. And I will never be the same.

But apparently life goes on. There is still good in the world and--thank God--good work to be done.

In my selected readings from the last 250 years of America, I came across a famous speech of Frederick Douglass, given to the Ladies' Anti-Slavery League of Rochester, N.Y., in 1852. I had never read it before, a failure of my education and yet another proof of a lack of anti-white-American indoctrination--but immediately put it on my syllabus for Comp 2 students to read, because it is a masterpiece that needs to be contended with by all Americans, alongside others like Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

Here is a portion of what the former slave........

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