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The Day I Learned I am Part Republican

When I was a child, according to a story that my mother has told me a few times, I apparently went into the voting booth with one of my grandmothers and pulled the lever to vote for Ronald Reagan. Not only this, but I repeated this four years later — and I wasn’t even ten years old yet! It was not until 1996 that I was able to legitimately vote for myself and my vote went for Ralph Nader, as I thought that it would be good to get the Green party officially recognized and taken more seriously in the following election — that did not work out so well.

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Governor Christie Gives Thanks Where It Is Due

It seemed like a long time ago in a state not too far away from me (New Jersey, close in heart and with much family) a governor named Chris Christie told eager listeners that the President of the United States, Barack Obama, was similar to a person who was stumbling around in a dark room looking for a light switch. He was a leader incapable of leading, and as such did not deserve the presidency that he won. That was, in fact, only about two weeks ago — but then something unexpected happened.

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Four More Years of Humanism History: Ten Sentence Story #169

Barack Obama was delighted to win a second term as the President of the United States — proving now and forevermore — that humanism beats a machine any day of the week and any year of the vote.

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The Two Realities of the Election: Ten Sentence Story #167

There are two realities, almost like two parallel universes that co-exist and yet could not be any more different — and yet somehow, we who sit week by week watching debate by debate and looking at polls are meant to believe, depending on whom we believe, that either one or the other reality it the only real one.

In the Romney reality, the only people that count are the one that pay their taxes — but should the one doing the counting be someone who avoids paying his fair share of taxes through offshore banking and international money laundering?

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Defending Clint Eastwood in Live Performance

I have been ruminating on the Clint Eastwood Empty Chair performance at Romney’s GOP convention, and I just can’t help loving what he was trying to do.  I’m not kidding or being facetious.  What Eastwood did was actually pretty brave and interesting and, while it didn’t really work out in the end — due to poor dramatic structure and lack of a button ending — it was still dangerous and exciting and absolutely real.

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What's in a Deaf Sign Name? Hunter and his Gun!

The last week of August caught a firestorm in the Grand Island, Nebraska Public Schools system as administrators scrambled to recover from banning a three-year-old Deaf child named Hunter Spanjer from using his sign name because his fingers “looked too much like a gun” — and any sort of suggestion of a gun, even as a sign name, is verboten.

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Thanks for Giving Us "Amercia," Mitt Romney

In the history of literature, there are many examples of writers changing the spelling of America to have an artistic effect. The spelling can be changed for reasons ranging from strong sarcasm to political commentary. Ice Cube, after all, released an album called AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted — an astute criticism of racism in the United States. It is like how sometimes the United States is spelled with a dollar sign (United $tates) to reflect the power that money has in the United States political process.

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Obama Chooses Love

Yesterday, Barack Obama made a wise and moral choice in publicly coming out in favor of same sex marriages:

… in an interview with ABC News, President Obama said, “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

With that one statement, he made it clear that he believes that it’s wrong to prevent couples who are in loving, committed relationships from getting married. …

In the interview, he said that he had discussed the issue around the dinner table with his wife and daughters. He said he’d heard from service members who, even after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, felt constrained because they aren’t allowed to get married.

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Obama to Reward Restraint in Tuition Increases

My mother always told me that when it came to higher education, it was more important where you got degrees at the Masters level and above than where you got your bachelor’s degree. A person could, for example, get a bachelor’s degree at my alma mater Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey and then a Masters degree from Harvard and be equally impressive (according to my mother) as a person who got both degrees from Harvard. At the time that I attended Rutgers, the tuition was under four thousand dollars for New Jersey residents.

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Obama Dedicates the Man in Granite

Yesterday, President Obama dedicated the dramatic 30-foot high Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial emerging out of granite, and that moment of unveiling was a grand indicator of how far we’ve come in a short time and oh how so much much farther we have to travel together.

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