(This is the second and concluding segment of “Our national debt to blacks is real.”) Many Americans, white and black, have started from nothing and reached great heights, but many more have used the gifts rightly handed down from earlier generations as much-needed and appreciated steps on that metaphorical ladder. To deny or ignore...
Here’s an admittedly controversial hypothesis: anyone who insists that we owe black Americans absolutely nothing at all in light of the residual effects of slavery, Jim Crow and decades of segregation and discrimination is a racist. Or a bigot. Or maybe both. The fact that such a statement is inflammatory doesn’t necessarily mean that...
With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaching, I found myself reading a lot of material that provided historical context for the tragedy, which I always thought was largely overlooked or usually glossed over. One of the more intriguing books I encountered, Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream published in 2007, included a passage that I...
There was a time when the divide between right and left, Republican and Democrat, didn’t seem anything remotely approaching the chasm that exists today. I imagine for the millions of whatever alphabetically labeled generations are included in ages 18-40, there may have never been a point in their lifetime when they saw much in...
The collective malfeasance of the current Congress as it wallows around in the self-inflicted wound of the debt-ceiling fiasco ought to bring into greater clarity a starkly disturbing reality: the current system can’t be fixed. Our national political arena provides good government for corporate special interests that provide so much of the campaign money...
Two of my favorite things converge in the release of the movie “Moneyball” in September, and I’m more than a little fascinated by what seems from a distance to be a vanity production of an admittedly interesting topic. Baseball movies have – to understate it a bit – a checkered history that dates back...