The horrific murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police May 25 set off a tidal wave of national and global outrage that has renewed interest in and debate on Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 protests against racial inequality and police brutality.
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Read MoreThe great comedian Red Skelton acidly remarked of the well-attended funeral of tyrannical movie boss Harry Cohn, “Well, it just goes to show you: Give the people what they want and they’ll turn out for it.”
President Donald J. Trump has given the people what they didn’t want — American carnage — and they’ve turned out for it anyway. Boy, have they turned out for it. Protesters from sea to shining sea this weekend have made the tiki torches of the white supremacists .who terrorized Charlottesville in 2017 look like candles in the wind. (I wonder if Trumpet is measuring the size of these crowds.)
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Read MoreWell, so much for those “You Ain’t Black” T-shirts .
President Donald J. Trump and the Republicans — always ready to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as their handling of the pandemic demonstrates — were all set to capitalize on former Vice President Joe Biden’s gaffe that presumed to tell black people they couldn’t really be black if they voted for Trump, as if there aren’t black Republicans and conservatives. But Biden’s remark, however maladroit, contained the kernel of a question: Might a black Trump supporter actually be voting against his own interests?
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Read MoreOn Nov. 20 — which, as it turned out, would’ve been the 94th birthday of onetime Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan on June 5, 1968 — PBS’ “Nova” aired a fascinating program, “The Violence Paradox” — one that said a lot about the paradox of empathy in our own time.
Based on the controversial work of psychologist Steven Pinker, the program posited that civilization has become increasingly less violent — yes, despite a world in which every Middle Eastern, African and South American country appears to be protesting its corrupt leadership, Hong Kong students are fighting for democracy against China in a classic David-versus-Goliath battle; and school shootings continue unchecked in the United States.
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Read MoreAlabama has indicted a woman in the death of her fetus after she started a fight with another woman, who then shot her. The shooter was not indicted.
If this all sounds nuts, it’s actually perfectly logical in a place whose laws value guns more than life and the life of the unborn over that of the mother.
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Read MoreI think it’s fair to say that no holiday is safe from President Donald J. Trump’s displeasure with whomever he’s displeased with at the moment.
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Read MoreConrad Richter’s 1953 novel “The Light in the Forest” tells the story of John Butler, who is kidnapped by the Lenni Lenape Indians in 18th-century Ohio when he is 4. His Lenape father, Cuyloga, loves him, raises him and renames him True Son – a name that resonates with irony and poignance as the story progresses and True Son confronts nature and nurture amid the realization that when you come from two worlds, you often wind up belonging to neither. Thus marooned, True Son asks, “Who is my father?”
It’s a question that some 2,000 undocumented children may be asking in the future. The Trump Administration has said it will need more time to reunite them with their parents. But already parents of 19 of the 101 detained children who are under the age of 5 have been deported. The parents of 19 others have been released and seemingly vanished – all of this according to The New York Times. …
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