Category Archives: Cross-Generational Issues

Will NPR’s Internal Dissenter Outlast My Cabbage??

Will NPR’s public dissenter lose his job before the cabbage in my fridge goes under the knife?

There’s a purple cabbage in my fridge. Cabbages will last pretty long if they are kept cold. But I plan to take it out one day soon, chop it up, then cook it with onions in a simple but delectable recipe I learned from my late lamented next door neighbor, Ms. Hazel.  It’s good.

But this post isn’t about a recipe. It’s  echoing a vegetable question I read about while dipping into online newspapers from England in late October 2022. Continue reading Will NPR’s Internal Dissenter Outlast My Cabbage??

Selma Alabama “Bloody Sunday” 59th Anniversary: La Lutta Continua

Garrison Keillor: “It’s the anniversary of the first March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama (1965), known as “Bloody Sunday.”

Six hundred civil rights activists left Selma to march the 54 miles to the state capitol, demonstrating for African-American voting rights.

They got six blocks before state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas.

ABC News interrupted a Nazi war crimes documentary to show footage of the violence. In the blink of a television set, national public opinion about civil rights shifted. Demonstrations broke out across the country.

Two weeks later, the March from Selma made it to Montgomery, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, federal court protection, and these words from President Lyndon Johnson: “There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.” When they got to Montgomery, they were 25,000 strong.

In response, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in August 1965. That law enfranchised millions of excluded Americans. It made possible the election of three presidents: Carter, Clinton & Obama.

The American right worked relentlessly to roll back the law. In 2013 the Supreme Court began to gut it, and vote suppression has become a legislative crusade in much of the country.

The struggle continues.

 

More on Selma & the struggle here.

Early Abortion & The Priest With Two Stethoscopes

Kansas & Wyoming, 1958-1960

St. Josephs Military Academy, Hays Kansas, late 1950s.

In those old days of the  (pre-Vatican Two) Catholic Church, they used to say of people like me that we had “lost our faith.”

In my case, it wasn’t quite true. That year, 1958,  as I turned sixteen,I didn’t lose my faith.  Instead, I discovered I just didn’t have any.

I was a junior at a Catholic boarding school, St. Joseph’s  Military Academy, in western Kansas. How I got there (my family was then on an Air Force  base in Puerto Rico), and what led me to realize my faithlessness are stories told in another place (for the curious, details are in the memoir, Meetings).

Continue reading Early Abortion & The Priest With Two Stethoscopes

Dyer on the “Pause”; West Bank Eruption? A Left-Wing Jew & the War

#1 – Israel-Hamas Ceasefire

22 November 2023

Israel-Hamas Ceasefire

By Gwynne Dyer – Author, Historian & Independent Journalist

There are really three parties to the ‘pause’ – nobody is officially using the word ‘Author, Historian & Independent Journalistceasefire’ – that brings at least a temporary end to the fighting in the Gaza Strip. Two of the three parties, Hamas and the United States, would very much like it to turn into a permanent ceasefire, but Israel emphatically does not.

Continue reading Dyer on the “Pause”; West Bank Eruption? A Left-Wing Jew & the War

More Melancholy Wisdom on Israeli-Hamas War Myths

[NOTE: I agree with just about all that Nick Kristof says here. But his roster of myths  is incomplete. He overlooks a fourth “myth” that gets in the way of his humane insight and hope like the piles of rubble that mark this war on every front. More on that below.]

New York Times:

What We Get Wrong About Israel and Gaza
Nov. 15, 2023

By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist

With the bilateral slaughter in the Middle East unleashing poisons that are worsening hatred worldwide, let me outline what I see as three myths inflaming the debate:

The first myth is that in the conflict in the Middle East there is right on one side and wrong on the other (even if people disagree about which is which).

Life isn’t that neat. The tragedy of the Middle East is that this is a clash of right versus right. That does not excuse Hamas’s massacre and savagery or Israel’s leveling of entire neighborhoods in Gaza, but underlying the conflict are certain legitimate aspirations that deserve to be fulfilled. Continue reading More Melancholy Wisdom on Israeli-Hamas War Myths