Rethinking Community
I have what may seem kind of a cosmic question: Are we experiencing the contraction of a sense of community, in the broadest meaning of the term, that had been expanding for the last 50 years or more?
Read MoreAmerican Apartheid on Dexter Avenue
Not every resident of Montgomery was thrilled about last week’s opening of the lynching memorial and Legacy Museum. “It’s going to cause an uproar and open old wounds,” one told The Guardian. “It keeps putting the emphasis on discrimination and cruelty,” said another.
Read More“Southern Trees Bear Strange Fruit”*
In Montgomery we confronted our history – or more accurately, our history confronted us with a rawness from which we have shielded ourselves for centuries.
Read MoreConfronting the Past and Building the Future in Montgomery, Alabama
My daughter, Annie, and I just spent two days in Montgomery at the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which covers a small hilltop above Alabama’s capital city. It is an extraordinarily uplifting name for what is, in fact, a heartrending tribute to the more than 4,000 African American victims of lynching in America.
Read MorePete McCloskey Looks Back and Ahead on Earth Day
The environmental depredations of Trump, his Secretary of Interior and EPA Administrator should cause every high school graduate in June 2018 to emulate their predecessors of 1970 and turn out voters for Democrats this November.
Read More“Yep, son, we have met the enemy and he is us.”*
Sunday was a big day, at least for me: it was both the 48th Earth Day and my grandson’s third birthday, and I hope Jamie grows up to take good care of both of us.
Read More“Please, Sir, I want some more.”
“I know how much is enough,” a friend of mine once said to me. “It’s just a little more than you have right now.”
Read MoreRevisiting and revising the American dream
It has become increasingly clear that many Americans no longer buy into the American dream.
Read MoreEat, Drink and Be Merry. Just Don’t Get Sick
Yesterday 24/7 Wall Street published a piece on the “Most (and Least) Healthy Countries in the World.” The rankings are based on an index that measures four variables: “life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and incidence of tuberculosis.”
Read MoreFar from the Ivory Tower: Global Warming Research in the Gulf of Maine
“What makes me so nervous about the changes that are happening with rapid climate change is less where we are going than the rate we are going there.”
Read MoreThe Strangers’ Gate: An Anti-Wall Concept
Up near the northwest corner of New York’s Central Park, across from the intersection of 106th Street and Central Park West, stands The Strangers’ Gate, one of 20 named entrances to the park, which was designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux
Read MoreThe antidote to bombast: politicians who will listen
As I wrote last time, the Knight Foundation recently reported the lowest levels of trust in our government since Gallup began tracking the issue sixty years ago. In 1964, for example, 74 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right at least most of the time. Today that figure is less than 25 percent.
Read MoreIn a Divided Nation, Seeking Common Ground
This is a dangerous place to be. Donald Trump shows no interest in finding common ground, but seeks only to divide us for his political advantage. My fear is that too many Democrats seem to be following the same path.
Read More“Purple mountain majesties”
“The land was ours before we were the land’s,” Robert Frost, The Gift Outright
Read MoreEndangered Species: Of Birds, Neighborhoods and Democracies
It’s a unique combination of art and social activism, which will, I hope, cause you to reflect on the beauty and the fragility of both our endangered birds and our imperiled neighborhoods.
Read MoreWhy are we giving fat cats a free lunch?
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Lucretius
Some call bureaucratic regulations “job killers” that stifle economic growth
Others call them protections that safeguard human health and the environment.
Read MoreAn Immigrant, an Artist and an American Mythmaker
Two hundred years ago 17-year-old Thomas Cole emigrated from England to the United States, where he would revolutionize painting in his new country by creating “wild landscapes that were unmistakably American.” Born at the onset of the industrial revolution, Cole discovered in the American wilderness an antidote to the polluted rivers, poisoned air, and exploited working people that he had witnessed in the land of his birth.
Read MorePolitics is fleeting, art endures
In Kalman Aron’s life, art quite literally prevailed over power, allowing him to survive in a place where he was powerless. On a broader level, I wonder whether there may yet be a role for art in a world in which power is the supreme – and increasingly the only – value.
Read MoreWashington Menu: Universal Service, Public Service and Self Service
I have written in the past about universal service for all Americans, not military service only, but a whole range of “opportunities” – from working in our underfunded public schools to cleaning up our national parks to rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, from the Peace Corps to the Civilian Conservation Corps – and nobody ever disagreed.
Read MoreJust Another Congressperson Telling It Like It Isn’t
“It's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so,” Mark Twain
Read More