It is inconceivable that another TV news anchor could ever be to Americans what Cronkite was during the 1960s and 1970s: a sort of national family uncle, wise, reassuring, understanding, a man they could trust to tell them the news – to borrow his own sign-off line from the CBS Evening News – the way it was.
Ever a force for understanding, a man of generous spirit, a teacher, researcher, mentor and friend, Bert never turned from responsibility and never tired of our work.
The country continues to grapple with understanding how a man who hurled hate with such Trumpian ease could be elected the mayor of the largest city in a country famous for its progressive politics.
It does so, it seems, ideally by the educational means that a dialectician would use — by accurately focusing the discussion onto the object of inquiry, in this case man, and thus helping interlocutors to proceed with the task of defining, and thereby understanding, what a man essentially is.
But for Donn Clendenon, the distance -- in miles and experience -- has brought about compassion, a sorrowful understanding of a man's pitiful predicament and a deeper understanding of how these things come to pass.
Following the general Renaissance custom, Locke defined an idea as a mental entity: "whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks".
"If there is a common understanding between a man and his wife, that they don't want to have more children, then there's nothing that is stopping men from [having] a vasectomy.
The authorities say he reached an understanding with a man whom the police identified as his less powerful ethnic Albanian counterpart, Mentor Beqiri, 32, who was arrested in 2009 on charges of oil smuggling by the Kosovo police that were later dropped for insufficient evidence.
In the course of her research into her father's ancestry, her initial anger about his lies turns into a sympathetic understanding of a man "with no Jewish education of any kind, a vessel emptied of Jewish content, open to the magical metamorphosis promised by conversion".
I reprise this anecdote here not to show how evolved I am, but rather to juxtapose my hazy whale-belief structure with the much more nuanced understanding of a man who has immersed himself in the subtleties, trickeries, scandals and science of cetaceans.
The term 'idea,' Locke tells us "…stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks" (Essay I, 1, 8, p. 47).
