Not Captains of Our Souls The more we learn about the creatures who inhabit this planet with us, the more obvious it seems that, regardless of what William Ernst Henley believed, we are not the captain of our souls, nor can we master our fate. [1] Yes, to some degree we can choose how to respond to adversity, and this is really what his poem is about. Written when he lay ill with tuberculosis and feared he might lose a foot, which was especially worrisome because he’d already had one leg cut off when he was sixteen, Henley’s poem honors his courage and his “unconquerable soul.” His words have inspired…
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Punishment versus Forgiveness
Imprisonment and Punishment In the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 20 decision in Utah vs. Strieff that gives police officers the right to stop you for no reason at all, discover you have an outstanding warrant, search you, and then use anything they find as evidence against you in court, I feel a kind of despair. Our insatiable need to contain, corral, and punish those who threaten our money, power, or comfort is so strong we’re willing to erode all safeguards against police overreach. In her rebuttal to the court’s decision in the Utah vs. Strieff case, Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “We must not pretend that the…