Sometimes current history requires that we reexamine our fundamental beliefs and understand in new ways why we feel the way we do. For me, in these hate-filled times, it seems clearer than ever that any kind of prejudice — from racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, to ageism, religious prejudice, and all cultural and tribal hatreds […]
Columns
Six Liberties of Compassion
A poem by V.B. Price I. RESTRAINT Are we all prophets without honor in the homeland of our inner lives, weeping Jeremiahs haranguing our resentments, pathetic outbursts, sly lusts, our sweet teeth chattering? What a joy it would be to have no need of self-restraint. To be so true to life that we are, […]
Take Care of Your Children, Be Helpful, Be Good
Most of us in America — rich or poor, female or male, religious or not, from the right or left, in all ethnic or racial communities — have it somewhere in our political DNA the ethical imperatives to be helpful and to be good. That is the foundation for all realistic hopefulness in this time […]
A Tea Party, Moral Majority, Sagebrush Rebellion Supreme Court?
With the retirement of senior Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, the chance of the United States finding itself at the mercy of the dark side of its collective psyche is terrifyingly real. With a second Trump appointee on the bench, a Tea Party-Moral Majority-Sagebrush Rebellion Supreme Court could pile up xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic […]
What Does America Look Like These Days?
Does America look like a proto-neo-Nazi state? Does it seem like some foreign power is yanking our chain and messing with the honest dialogue and exchange of views, not to mention our inviolable voting rights, that still makes our Democracy work in the sense of a peaceful transfer of power at the appropriate times? Are […]
Orphaning Children and Submerging Cities — the Inhumanity of Sociopathic Conservative Values
Separating immigrant children from their families to prove a point and stalling for decades on national legislation to help diminish the traumatizing impact of climate change on cities around the country and the world both stem from a conservative bias against regular, everyday human beings. It’s a bias that allows them to use what power […]
President Corleone: Trump, Tim McVeigh, the Neo-Nazi KKK Underground and the Perils of Self-Coronation
When you think about the act of “self-pardoning,” as in President Trump’s assertion that he has the “absolute right” to get away with anything he wants to because the office of president is “sacred,” as his lawyers contend, it doesn’t take long to arrive at the bottom-line conclusion: self pardoning is what all mafia dons […]