Crossroads

Last spring when the board of the Association for Death Education & Counseling met just before our annual conference in Atlanta, my friend and colleague Louis Gamino, ADEC president last year had arranged for our board to visit the King Center . It was a moving, poignant afternoon. Having grown up in the deeply divided and segregated south of the 1960s, the visit to the King Center rekindled some emotions long buried. Some of us stood in the rain in front of Dr. & Mrs. King's tomb. One stirring moment for many of us came as we sat together in the old Ebenezer Baptist Church where over the PA system, docents regularly replay the audiotape of the last sermon Martin Luther King preached in that church just weeks before his death. It was the same sermon--one in which he retold how he hoped he would be remembered, almost as if foretelling his death just weeks away--that Mrs. King had replayed at his Palm Sunday with friends funeral. The following Sunday morning, a few of us fro...

William G. Hoy Baylor University On the April 14, 2020 episode of the CBS hit drama NCIS , naval investigators Ellie Bishop (Emily Wickersham) and Nick Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) interviewed a 95-year old Pearl Harbor veteran who quizzed the two. "When was the attack on Pearl Harbor?" he asked and neither could give a date. "How many died on the U.S.S. Arizona?" he asked more fervently, and again, neither could provide a number. "Then bring in the old Marine with gray hair; I'll only talk to him," the older man demanded. In my clinical faculty role at Baylor , I teach History of Medicine --and I know a little of the older veteran's pain. Many of my young students have little sense of the specifics of what has gone before and when it happened, a point I take as dangerous for the culture in general. As George Santayana wisely reminded us: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Throughout the current Coronavirus...