Of Race, Rebels and Reprisal

    Three recent movies. And it is not my custom generally to say run, don’t walk, to see modern flicks. If you are as selective as I am regarding cinema and of what among it is a waste of time, you too are amazed at the way people enter theaters with such expectation and, sadly, [...]

Crime Pays: Imagine That

    There was a time, we thought, that the good guys got the bad guys. Justice, it seemed, was swift and fair. Punishment, we imagined, fit the crime. The cell door slammed and that was that.     Where did it end? With corrupt or lenient judges? With the dumbing-down of jury panels? No, it had [...]

It Was A Most Un-Civil War

    It was a hundred and fifty years ago and we still aren’t over it. Less than a century after Independence to create a nation, we were at each other’s necks in a Civil War of “father against son and brother against brother.” Keep in mind that included mothers and daughters too. The accompanying graphic [...]

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Think of Tina Turner’s hit song: “What’s love, what’s love, got-to-do, got-to-do with it…” Cometh Valentine’s Day, and storefronts are sick with every shade of red. Gosh, we’re a loving people. You can tell from our music, literature, rhetoric and scriptures. We sing and rhapodize about it, and look for it in all the wrong [...]

Coming Down the Mountain

These words were meant to be posted earlier but, well, shots rang out again, this time in Arizona. How ironic that we were only days away from commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr., himself a victim of gun violence. He had been to the mountain-top, a “peak experience” perhaps, but the trip down is often disappointing, [...]

Mosque-ing the Truth

Anything Obama says or does will be criticized by the radical right, who are masquerading as “conservatives,” though not worthy of the name. It warmed my heart to see him give voice to religious freedom in regard to the mosque center–and he did not “back off” or “qualify” that stance the following day. Whoever can [...]

Thank God for Arizona

Were it not for the benighted legislators of that state we wouldn’t be having a long-overdue national discussion regarding immigration. If such people did not exist, we would have to create them. Before, there was no real “dialogue,” just one-sided, loud declamations by people with no knowledge of immigration history and other, always-present xenophobes who [...]

Just Don’t Call Us Racists

Denial, as they say in Twelve Step programs, ain’t just a river in Egypt. And there is an adage in religious circles that Dutch Baptists choke on their pipes when they see Spanish Baptists drinking red wine. Everyone else has a problem, except “us.” And certainly we are not racists. To say, as was common [...]

Mad About Race Again

The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. episode in the heart of Massachusetts’ liberal intellectualism revived latent feelings in people of all races nationwide. A spark set off a conflagration in the “Republic of Cambridge,” Massachusets and has all the nation up in arms, except in countries where people subjected to real race riots and even genocide [...]

Just Do the Right Thing

The election of a black president is not to say we have vanquished American racism Beware of thinking this is a new day in race relations. It is and it isn’t. For many young people, black and white, the civil rights movement is ancient history; the rest of us remember vividly segregated schools and separate [...]