Category: Board Commentary

By Harlan Garbell

The American people are not very happy right now. This year the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) asked people about their personal happiness. Only 14 percent of the respondents indicated that they were “very happy,” the lowest on record. Moreover, 23 percent expressed unhappiness, the highest percentage recorded by NORC since 1972. I don’t think those of you reading this would find these findings particularly surprising considering the events of the past few months.  

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By Harlan Garbell

The death of George Floyd while in the police custody, and the ensuing protests, have shocked our community as no other event since I arrived in Minneapolis in 1994. When my wife and I moved from Chicago into our house near Cedar Lake, we really had no clue as to the historical racial or religious divisions in the “City of Lakes.” We just loved this beautiful city. (Of course, we first came to Minneapolis in May.) As a newcomer to the Twin Cities, one of the first things I did was watch the local evening news. I figured this was the quickest way to learn about our new environs.

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By Harlan Garbell

Like many of you I have a fascination with history. Even as a child, I was always curious about historical events and how the future, for better or worse, was shaped by them. For example, one of my favorite television shows in the 50s was “You Are There,” where each week there was a dramatization of an actual historic event, like the assassination of Julius Caesar. Somehow I intuitively understood early on that history was important to understanding the present. Conversely, as I have aged I have come to realize ironically that you can also better understand the past from living through events in the present.

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By Harlan Garbell

Many years ago when I started out as a young lawyer in Chicago, working for the state of Illinois, I had a supervisor who was always concerned that his political bosses in Springfield were seeking to replace him. He had an ironically witty saying about his predicament:  “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”  I remembered that saying recently after reading about Attorney General William Barr’s speech at the University of Notre Dame Law School last October. Barr’s address was noteworthy in that it was ostensibly a paean to religious liberty but, in reality, was a frontal attack on secularism.

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By Harlan Garbell

I recently got hold of the bestselling book Educated by Tara Westover. It had been in my queue of books that I keep at the Hennepin County Library website, but something compelled me to read it at this time. Some of you no doubt have read this work or are familiar with its storyline.

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By Harlan Garbell

A few years ago, the term “virtue signaling” was coined by a writer in an article in the English publication The Spectator. Essentially, it has come to mean how people communicate through language, or otherwise, to “signal” that they are virtuous. Or perhaps at the very least, more virtuous than you are. This term has caught on and has since been used in articles or discussions about social, cultural, or political issues—usually in a pejorative manner. 

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By Harlan Garbell

Recently I googled the term “conspiracy theory” and the first thing that popped up was a definition that states “a belief that some covert but influential organization is responsible for a circumstance or event.”
I have to believe that conspiracy theories have always been part of the fabric of human society.

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By Harlan Garbell

In our May newsletter, I set out my vision for the next two years should I be elected president of HumanistsMN. It was, simply, for HMN to become the leading secular organization in the metro area for “nones” — the growing number of people without religious affiliation — who are seeking a welcoming, ethically based community. This vision can only become a reality if the members of our community pull together to make it happen.

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By Harlan Garbell

When Lyndon Johnson was the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, he had a notorious reputation as a deal maker who would vigorously browbeat balky senators until he got the outcome he wanted. One of his favorite sayings to these senators was ,“Don’t spit in the soup, we all gotta eat.” Essentially, what he meant was that there was plenty of government largesse for everyone as long as no one objected too much to some other senator’s wasteful pork barrel project.

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