Are you burned out on 9/11? If so, is that a tremendous moral crime for which there is no remedy? How can we — as a world of nations — have so quickly become so tired and weary of an event that smothered the end of any sense of freedom we have left a mere six years ago?
The bigger crime is an ongoing inexcusable wallowing mass of death and despair at “Ground Zero” that started as this:
Are we required to join? Are we made to create? It is necessary for us to belong to someone other than ourselves?
What happens when we are carved from each other and caved in a culture from which there is no escape?
It has always been treacherous to be Black in America — and if you’re a Black Man in America — your chances for even average survival are slimmer than your White peers.
Continue reading → Crimes of Birth: Dying Black in the Urban Core
Handguns are made to kill people. We know this in our bones because of murders in Far Rockaway and Fulham and Orange and now, once again, in Newark. The bloodshed in New Jersey, spewed Gangland style, killed three kids and injured another on an abandoned schoolyard in a tonier part of Newark — where this sort of thing doesn’t happen — called Ivy Hill.
As an avowed atheist — I prefer to worship art and nature — it may seem strange that I have a long list of religious friends. Of my many Mormon friends, I have discovered there are two topics that, when mentioned, will cause them to give you the stink eye and turn away from the conversation. If you press the matter, they will refer you to the LDS website for official commentary.
The first verboten topic is colloquially known as “The Mark of Cain” and it is an interesting and undeniable stain on the Mormon church where Blacks — men of African descent — were denied the priesthood because of their “mark”… their skin color.
Continue reading → The Mark of Cain and the Mountain Meadows Massacre
We are fast moving into the world of quick curing so we may better kill and that is a strange disconnect in a society where we are required to claim our care for each other.
Like Salome in antiquity — who was rewarded for her dance with the granting of any wish from King Herod — chose a false cure for a certain death and a killing from her own curse. John the Baptist never saw his beheading coming until he appeared on a silver platter.
Continue reading → Salome in Antiquity: To Cure To Kill Today
As a cogent and mindful people we are faced, once again, with the inappropriate disparity between rich and famous and the poor and unknown. I call this disconnect: The Celebrity Semiotic.
Continue reading → Celebrity Semiotic: The Bad Parenting of Paris Hilton
A city loses its innocence in increments — not in batches. I was alarmed to learn my hometown — Lincoln, Nebraska — recently had an incremental loss of its innocence blared in headlines and broadcast in frightened feelings. The incident happened between two strangers caught in the February chill on a Lincoln Public Schools bus. The city was irrevocably changed.
Public Opinion is formed in America in the disparate experiences of the masses that the major media then forms and congeals into an entity that can be measured and exploited via advertising.
The Editorial Cartoon, however, has always found its most purposeful purchase just outside that mainstream media venom line to pock and poke fun of falsely considered mainstream media values with sticks of truth and the bones of what is real.
The Supreme Court ruling this week outlawing partial-birth abortions was overshadowed by murders in Virginia — but the decision is a watershed moment in America: Do Women Own Their Bodies or Not? If women do own their bodies — and the decisions made therein — how do you reconcile the partial-birth abortion ban that does not take into consideration the health of the mother?
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