Once you’ve been writing for fifty years and know how to do it, the hardest part about writing a weekly column is deciding what to write about. That’s usually what I spend my Fridays doing — thinking about what to write about for the following week's Thursday’s column.

It’s Friday.

Traditionally, newspaper columns belong on an opinion page, alongside editorials. I can’t think of anything I don’t have an opinion about, from war to the way I like my morning coffee. I just have to choose, like when I was a kid with a dime in my pocket at the candy store downtown. It can be overwhelming.

I could write about my opinion of Thanksgiving. It would be topical. Next week’s column will come out on Thanksgiving Day. Traditionally, newspaper columns that come out on Thanksgiving Day are supposed to be all about all the things the columnist is thankful for, written in the style of a Norman Rockwell painting on the front page of the Saturday Evening Post — family, pets, indoor plumbing… the Packers are having another good season. 

I started writing a Thanksgiving column, but couldn’t get into it. The faces of hungry children holding empty tin pots barefoot in a bombed-out scene kept getting in the way. I could write about the war, that I’m against it. What more could I say? But I have to say  something. A weekly column is a commitment. You can’t just write them when you feel like it. It would be untraditional.

It’s Friday.

I’m feeling overwhelmed. Not just the column, but all there is to do... family for the holidays... clean the bathrooms, mop the floors, forgotten passwords...

I start a fire in the fireplace to help calm me down, which pleases the cats to no end. Culley Jane is off taking a hike at Cherry Creek State Park. There’s just me in our silent home wrestling with a question — what to write about when there's so much to do?

I had a clue.

After I got exiled from the press and before I became an over-the-road trucker, I went to nursing school and became a VA nurse. During a clinical rotation on a psych ward, it dawned on me that what makes a person crazy is not so much what they think as not knowing why they think the way they do.

Why do I think the way I do?

I called my old friend Eric Chaet up in Wisconsin. He, too, thinks a lot about thinking and is against the war.

“I’ve got too many things racing around in my mind and it’s making me crazy,” I moaned. “I don’t know where to start. Too many irons in the fire. Running a business. Errands to run and more. Passwords I thought I still knew. Why do I bite off more than I can chew? Is everybody like this, or is it just me and maybe you?”

“It’s just you,” he said, but I knew that he was joking around. He gets the same way sometimes, too, and writes long emails to me about it.

“Why do we think the way we do?” I said.

“Maybe because we feel responsible.”

Eric grew up Jewish in the neighborhoods of Chicago’s tough South Side. I first met him fifty years ago. He was the first real writer I ever met in person. We'd both been against the war.

Then we talked about why it seemed to each of us that there seemed to be no limit of the things to do; the danger of getting overwhelmed; a sort of paralysis; writer’s block; guilt; diminished motion — “Leibniz defined suffering as diminished motion,” I said.

“It’s interesting the way you bring Leibniz into everything,” Eric said, “especially in your columns lately. You’ve piqued my interest. I went to the local library yesterday to order two books about Leibniz. I don’t think many people are going to take the time to do that. Maybe you should write a column about him.”

“What? It would take a hundred thousand pages, not even including the non-Euclidian mathematics, which I don't understand. Do it in under 800 words? I think not.”

“Isn’t that what a weekly newspaper column is for?”

“I guess,” I said.

Leibniz had and did play a significant role in why I think the way I do. I first heard about him from Lyndon Larouche in the late 70s when I was a reporter in Detroit.  “A building assumes its shape from its foundation,” Larouche said. “Read Leibniz, starting with The Monadology. Then come back and we’ll talk some more.”

After I got run out of Detroit I took a bus and hitchhiked to a Kundalini Yoga ashram in British Columbia to plan my next move from higher ground. I had a wife and two kids to support. That’s where I first read The Monadology, one evening after satsang on a path in a tall-tree forest by the dim gray light of a bright full moon. I fell into another world hiding behind the screen of the way things look.

Once back in the real world, where I ran small town weeklies in Nebraska and our third was born, I reconnected with Larouche.

By then, in the late 80s, I had learned more about Leibniz. He’d been against the war. He grew up surrounded by a war's' remains, bones exposed along dirt roads after every heavy wind or punishing rain. He was born in 1646, two years before the Peace of Westphalia ended the 30 Years War. He grew up in a pious Lutheran family, but became an Irenicist.

He challenged the High Priests of Scientific Orthodoxy, led by Newton and his clockwork universe of colliding particles on random paths in empty space, winding down towards the perfect motionlessness of entropic death, waiting for a miracle to get things going again. 

Leibniz invented calculus to describe the world he imagined, where there was no such thing as empty space, no death, no resurrection. He imagined a timeless unfolding towards an idea of perfection. He’s considered the father of the Idea of Progress.

In the final paper he wrote before his death in 1714, he said the idea closest to his own was the Chinese concept of Chi — a kind of timeless, noncorporeal cosmic breath of life.

By the time I reconnected with Larouche he was locked up in a federal penitentiary on trumped up charges for opposing the war.

We talked on the phone. He reminded me of what Leibniz had said, that we live in the best of all possible worlds, but not the only possible world.

Larouche was paroled by Clinton and spent his remaining years against the war.  After he died in 2019, his wife, Helga, took the reins. She’s running for a seat in the German Bundestag, representing Berlin. She’s against the war, too. The Ukrainian government has her on its kill list.

On Dec. 7 there’s going to be a big Peace Rally in Washington, D.C. It’s being put together by a coalition of peace organizations from throughout the world. As head of the International Schiller Institute, Helga is a leading voice and force behind the effort. Just like in the old days, old and young marching and carrying signs: NO TO NUCLEAR WAR!

Culley Jane returned home after her hike. I asked her if she knew anybody in the D.C. area where I could stay for a couple of days. She looked suspicious. “Why?” she asked.

I told her about the peace march and rally at the Capital. Her look said: “You sure about this?” But she was ok with it if I was determined to do it. She said she did, in fact, know people in the D.C. area who might put me up, maybe even help me get to the Capital. She’s against nuclear war, too. We live not too far from the Air Force Academy, a logical first strike target.

I went back downstairs to my comfortable chair in front of the fireplace. A cat jumped up on my lap. She purred. Leibniz said anything that is possible demands to exist. My thoughts drifted back to Chicago in ’68 when I was 20 years old, demanding an end to the war. Tear gas. Wooden clubs. Peace was possible, demanding to exist. But I wasn’t a writer then. In the Beginning is the Word.

Will I, should I go to the Dec. 7 Peace March in Washington? I'm getting old. I’m sure I’d have lots of new adventures to write about. But what about my troublesome back? Days and nights on a Greyhound bus. Somebody’s couch. Maybe get lost on foot in the maze of an unfamiliar city without bathrooms with night approaching and no way to get home. All that was possible, too.

Will I go?

I don’t know, yet.

But it’s possible.

First, while I'm eating turkey, I’ll make sure to be thankful for the Idea of Progress, a glimpse behind the screen of the way things look. At least I have a clue to why I think the way I do, so I guess then that I must not be crazy.