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	<title>Against the Grain</title>
	<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog</link>
	<description></description>
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		<title>Welcome</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This Website will be devoted to essays and insights related to diversity, addiction/recovery, psychological growth issues, global perspectives, the disenfranchised,  aesthetics, and cultural values. The core value streaming throughout the essays I write will be about returning to our innocence, which sometimes requires a trauma, a jolt, an invasion of the “other,” or a paradigm [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/uncategorized/welcome/</link>
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		<title>Review of Alice Munro&#8217;s &#8220;Too Much Happiness&#8221;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Too Much Happiness
Alice Munro
Alfred A. Knopf, 2009
304pp
Alice Munro is one of those rare literary icons who has the distinct reputation as a crossover writer. She is  admired by academics for her literary sensibilities, the mainstream for her easy-to-identify-with characters, and fiction writers who continue to be amazed at her ability to construct a strong [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/aesthetics/review-of-alice-munros-too-much-happiness/</link>
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		<title>Tea Party Patriots, Part II</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In my last blog essay, I attempted to unravel the many complaints of the Tea Party followers. Three issues, however, seem to stick in the craw of those who believe in their heart of hearts that America is on the road to self-destruction: (1) The continuing loss of freedom because of big government and what [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/uncategorized/242/</link>
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		<title>Tea-Party Patriots (Part I)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Patriotic fervor takes many roads these days. Now there is a new highway entrance for the disgruntled and the angry in America. They are the new-and-allegedly-improved original tea-party patriots of America&#8217;s legendary Boston Tea Party. 
If there is a bonding message among the Tea Party followers, it is simply that they are not being heard [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/cultural-values/tea-party-patriots-part-i/</link>
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		<title>Thinking About Love</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
    				I thought about love once
				And then decided to
				See a movie instead.
				I thought about love again
				Just yesterday as the
				Inflated clouds dragged
				Themselves through
				The brush of blue sky
				Sealing into paper-
				Wrapping silence
				One eager plane with its
				Tired cargo of travelers.
				And today, well,
				I cannot tell a lie.
				I&#8217;m thinking about love
				In the middle of dinner
				Following the odor of
				Curry [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/aesthetics/thinking-about-love/</link>
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		<title>A Teenage Love Poem</title>
		<description><![CDATA[					Showing up on time
					Is the easy part.
					The dashboard of
					My rented car
					Free of dust,
					Wax-clean,
					Vacuumed carpets
					And a lemon smelling
					Tag dangling from
					The rear view mirror.
					One more look
					In the sun-visor
					Mirror, an angled glance
					At the straggly sideburns.
					Fly firmly zipped.
					Spitting on my closed
					Index fingers,
					I drag them along
					The creases of
					My black pants.
					I pull out a hanky,
					And shoe-shine the tips
					Of my eager shoes.
					Gently [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/uncategorized/a-teenage-love-poem/</link>
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		<title>Forgiveness</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I grew up in a religion in which confession was a weekly ritual. As I child, I remember standing in line outside the confessional  waiting anxiously for my turn to go into a dark private room and begin with the words, “bless me father, for I have sinned.” Then I would recite my litany [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/cultural-values/forgiveness/</link>
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		<title>Health Insurance, a Crapshoot</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Nothing in life is certain, as the saying goes, except death and taxes. We live in a world of uncertainties. No one has any control of where they&#8217;re going to be born, what kind of parents they&#8217;re going to have, and what economic and social status they&#8217;re going to born into. We don&#8217;t come into [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/cultural-values/health-insurance-a-crapshoot/</link>
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		<title>Health Insurance and the Profit Motive</title>
		<description><![CDATA[(The next two blog entries I will be posting consist of a two-part series about the American Health Insurance crisis. In the first essay, I discuss the Health Care industry in the U.S. as a profit-driven corporation. In the second essay,  I will be looking at  privatized Health Insurance as a crap-shoot)
Before I [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/uncategorized/american-health-insurance-part-i/</link>
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		<title>Surrender</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Before I started to write an essay on surrender, I went to my twitter page and tried to send another one of my many “What are you doing” twitter messages. Up popped a mysteriously serious black-and-white message, “HTTP Server Error 503.” I was back in Kafka land, the world of high-tech jargon, a cosmos that [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://johntmarohn.com/blog/alcohol-recovery/surrender/</link>
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