Category Politics/Culture

So we are at the end of these Olympic Games. Mammoth undertaking, nearly the entire world enthralled to some degree or other with these contests reflecting intense passion, competitive fire, and, for the most part, a sense of universal brother-and-sisterhood, human solidarity writ large across nations and cultures and even religions of the world, oh my…

All of it reflecting years of effort and training and dreaming for a select few fortunate enough to make it to this pinnacle of the sporting world.

(Yes, I know it also reflects rampant commercialization, politicization, fraud and influence peddling etc.; I’ll get back to you the very moment I find a large human endeavor that is free of those…)

In the midst of it all, a quartet of lunkhead male swimmers, who I’m sure are fine sons and friends and teammates with many scores of good people who can vouch for their essential good character, get too much ...

Amidst the many soaring/pointed/Trump-eviscerating speeches that piled atop one another throughout last week’s Democratic National Convention, even the powerful call-out by the Muslim couple who had lost their soldier son in the Afghan War didn’t quite match the moment for me when a hulking African American minister with a congenital spinal condition limped out on stage in his clerical collar and in a sonorous voice intoned:

“Good evening my brothers and sisters. I come before you tonight as a preacher, the son of a preacher. A preacher immersed in the movement at five years old. I don’t come tonight representing any organization, but I come to talk about faith and morality. I’m a preacher and I’m a theologically conservative liberal evangelical biblicist...

Love, like or loathe her, last night’s vote for Hillary Clinton as the first major party female nominee for president of the United States had all the ghosts of women’s rights throughout history cheering loudly, another milestone finally achieved and behind us all now. Whether that results in yet another milestone come November is now in the hands of voters.

The event had me thinking of my own daughter and daughters everywhere, catapulted yet again upon the shoulders of towering historical figures, lionesses who saw so clearly what needed to be done, and who stood proudly, fiercely and defiantly for the righteousness of their cause. Probably chief among them: Susan B. Anthony.

I am indebted here to a fascinating account of Anthony’s arrest and trial (for the “crime” of voting) by Professor Doug Lindner of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, the complete text of which you can find...

Oh my, all that yelling and venom and gloating and ridicule, last week from the Republican convention, soon to be emulated, no doubt, when the Demos convene in Philadelphia starting today. (Though we can only pray their denunciations of the opposing candidate will stop short of calling for his execution or banishment to the gulag or, worse yet, to an everlasting intimate relationship with Lucifer, the very Devil himself, in the fires of Hell. That latter image begs the continuing question that served as a subtext throughout the presidential primary season: Is Ben Carson even a little bit sane?)

I tell you, never have we endured such invective, such boiling anger, such a deep and divisive partisan split between opposing factions of our nation.

Except for that nasty business that began at Ft. Sumter 165 years ago, that is...

Hardly have time to catch our breath or remember the exact names and places of carnage anymore, do we?

Orlando, San Bernardino, Charleston, Newtown, Aurora…was Columbine even in this century? (It wasn’t; the year was 1999, 38 U.S. mass shootings ago.)

And most recently, Baton Rouge and Dallas.

Begetting the question: Is our country falling apart?

To which the short and direct answer is “No.”

But it takes some doing and a substantial amount of reality testing to get there, given the long and vivid reach of modern media and the potent effect it has on our consciousness. If we look only at the litany of racially tinged events—the multiple killings of unarmed black men by police, and the recent wave of retaliatory murders of police officers—we might surmise we are on the brink of another civil war, with the racial divide as deep as it was in the 1960s...