As published for The Columbus Dispatch on May 1st, 2010:

My wife, Stephanie, and I brought home our sons from Russia when they were toddlers – our first in 2006 and our second the following year. Each process took 18 months, came with three-week stays in Russia and cost about the price of a small luxury car. With the help of an adoption agency accredited by Russia that had a good 15-year record, our experience was smooth, fair and relatively uneventful.

It wasn’t free from scrutiny, however. If you can imagine a mortgage application, crossed with an SAT test, combined with a colonoscopy, you’re half-way there. And why not? We’re talking about the life and future of a human being.

You can imagine my reaction when I read recently about the Tennessee woman who sent her Russian adopted son back to Moscow, by himself, on a commercial airline flight, claiming she could no longer cope with him. There are just no words to capture how wrong this was.

Like any decent person, I felt revulsion toward this woman and hurt for this little boy. And, as an adoptive parent, I also knew something worse: that this little boy wouldn’t be the only one hurt by this woman’s thoughtless, selfish actions.

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As published for the Cleveland Plain Dealer on October 11, 2009:

I found my calling in high school when I was suspected of cheating.

At the start of my senior year I wrote an essay on William Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech in which he called on writers to inspire humanity to overcome its fear of the then-new threat of nuclear annihilation.

While I cannot recall what I wrote, I remember my English teacher, Mrs. Gentry, calling me up to her desk the next day to ask if I wrote it myself. When I said yes, she paused, looked me in the eye and said, “Are you being honest? No one helped you?” “No, ma’am,” I replied. “OK, go sit down. It’s very good,” she said. I went on to major in journalism.

The news that President Barack Obama won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize made me think of him, not as Faulkner in this example, but as myself.

In awarding the prize to Obama – and nominating him a mere 14 days after his inauguration – the Nobel committee has again voiced its opinion, not of the achievements of a man unknown to the world just three years ago, but about U.S. foreign policy. His award marks the third Peace Prize handed out as a protest against the policies of my former boss, President George W. Bush. In announcing its decision, the committee cited Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” during his presidency, especially his push for reducing nuclear weapons.

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