I heard an interesting discussion on the radio the other day that the problem with modern policing in the urban core today is not only the matter of Pretend Police replacing real officers, but also one of the police distrusting the general public by considering everyone a danger instead of innocent, ordinary, people.
Continue reading → Policing and Loving the Ordinary Enemy Civilian
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.
I thought the whole reason we are slogging through the war in Iraq is to keep the Terrorists “there” and not “here?” That, at least, is the war drum President Bush has been beating and still beats. In a 2003 interview — published on the White House website — Bush makes it clear the Terrorists will remain “over there” as long as we stay there engaging them in Iraq (emphasis added):
Q: Well, what about the suggestion from your critics that while you won the war, the peace is being bungled? THE PRESIDENT: They’re wrong. We’re making great progress in Iraq. We’ve got a pretty steep hill to climb. After all, one, we’re facing a bunch of terrorists who can’t stand freedom. These thugs were in power for awhile, and now they’re not going to be in power anymore, and they don’t like it. And they’re willing to kill innocent people. Their terrorist activities — we’d rather fight them there than here.
I thought we were finished wiping up after Don Imus this week, but the ongoing reverberations in the media and in our comments for all our coverage are still too strong to ignore — Don Imus and the Rutgers Nappy Headed Hos and Race and the American Humor Line and The Lesson of Don Imus: Red is Thicker than Green and Creating Consequential Context: A Semiotic Moral Correction for Don Imus — and while some of our regular commenters have fallen off into the darkness, their voices have been replaced with new commenters offering counter-advocacy and fascinating arguments.
Please forgive the title of today’s article, but yesterday I heard a discussion on the radio of the 2008 Democrat race for president and the topic was: “The Bitch or The Black?”
Continue reading → The Bitch Or The Black?: The Politics of Division
When I was a boy of 13 and a new student at a junior high school, I met a girl my age named Amy. She had the body of a woman, fully shaped and ripe with a juicy sexuality that flowed from her pores and her glinting, tawny, eyes — but she was still a girl in spirit and mind.
She was voluptuous, but didn’t yet know it. Amy told me I reminded her of her father — I wasn’t sure if that was an insult or a compliment. She was popular. Boys older than her hovered around her like flies seeking a sweet landing. She spoke to me infrequently, though I often admired her from afar with my first schoolyard crush.
Amy was good in math. At that time, in the red Republican Midwest, females were not encouraged by their families to seek non-traditional paths in school or out of school, so when a girl showed amazing analytical promise in math and the sciences, she was fast-tracked by the school system to deepen her interest and her ability to fully exploit all of her intellectual talents. Amy was leading the school in spirit, heart and mind.
Then she disappeared.
I recently heard on the radio 45% of American Black males do not graduate from high school. Why does their education end before their 18th birthday? Is there something culturally askew where education has no value? Are they born not to succeed in life? Is there a genetic code that denies them fruitful opportunity for living? The answer to those questions is a resounding: No!
Continue reading → The Myth of Racial Harmony: Dumb and Dangerous
The rude and crude radio fool is back and he’s poking fun at a Parkinson sufferer and accusing him of faking illness in order to help Democrats win office. Meet Viagra-smuggler and Oxycontin-addicted and mudslinger-against-the-disabled, Rush Limbaugh. Here’s his mugshot when he was arrested on fraud charges:
For today only — and only in this article and its comments — I am lifting the ban on using derogatory terms in order to better understand, to provide context for, and to help eradicate forever from the lips of humankind, an especially vicious sort of name calling that blends an insult across gender lines to hurt both men and women at the same time.
With the recent explosions of vitriol from Mel Gibson against the Jews in general and with the new insurgency against Israel proper by Hezbollah in particular, one begins to wonder about the how and the why of blaming the world’s troubles on the Jews. I decided to do some quick Google searches on historically paired stereotypical keywords to see what kind of hate against the Jews was being officially published on the internet and the results were hateful but not surprising.
Continue reading → Blame it on the Jews: A History of Hating
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