Karen Finney: It’s time to reframe the conversation about guns to focus on how we address the realities of human behavior to more effectively prevent gun violence and protect our safety.
Time for Political Depolarization
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Charles Hayes: When the hot-button issues that divide us become the preoccupation of media in order to gain audience share, the result is intense demographic polarization.
David Brooks’s Anti-Poverty Program: “Bourgeois Paternalism”
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Joseph Palermo: After telling his readers he isn’t going to blame the poor for being poor because of their bad behavior, David Brooks plows right ahead and blames the poor for being poor because of their bad behavior.
Occupy Movement at the Crossroads
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Randy Shaw: Successful movements must be flexible enough to change tactics in the face of roadblocks, and activists’ camping in public spaces is not strategically necessary for the Occupy movement’s success.
Which Way Occupy LA?
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Margot Paez: The large group of American working class who stood on the corner of Spring and Temple with determination and hope, have disappeared. There are 500 tents at Occupy LA, and only five people standing on the corner on a given day.
When We All Are Doing Better
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Carl Bloice: Greed is rampant, poverty and economic inequality are growing relentlessly in our country and our political system is ever increasingly corrupted by money. The system is in trouble.
Walter M. Plumbs the Depths of Homophobia
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Adam Eran: Intolerance is costly in other ways, too. The U.S. doesn’t get the cheaper, more effective single-payer health care now because racist Dixiecrats in Congress were concerned that federally-sponsored health care would mix the races in Southern hospitals.
Government May Be Violating Tobacco’s 1st Amendment Rights
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Walter Brasch: A controversial Supreme Court decision less than two years ago could have the unintended consequence of significantly reducing the government’s 46-year campaign against cigarettes.
Mother Nature’s Day
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Steve Hochstadt: My whole gardening effort is unnatural. Without constant human intervention to develop these artificial arrangements of plants, very different processes would take over.
Subsidized Childcare Breaks Poverty Cycle
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Tracy Emblem: Subsidized childcare allows a parent to work, look for a job, or attend a work-training program or school with a defined graduation plan. Self-sufficiency is the goal – to lift families out of poverty, and off of the welfare rolls and into taxpaying jobs
Arctic Turkey: My New Year’s Resolution
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Tina Dupuy: 40% of Americans actually make New Year’s resolutions. Sure, I did it once – five years ago this week I reluctantly quit smoking. How did I quit? Arctic turkey. I simply didn’t smoke. People who have never smoked think this is the moment of triumph. I went from heavy smoking to heavy sobbing.
Daring to Be Ourselves…Financially
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Manisha Thakor: Women who consistently negotiate their salaries throughout their careers earn $1 million more over their work lives than women who do not. We pay a high price for not speaking up for ourselves financially in the workplace. Here are a few money mantras that may help.
Time to Rebrand Haiti’s Tent Cities as Tomas Approaches
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Georgianne Nienaber: Haiti’s Potemkin village, the Camp Corail-Cesselesse relocation camp, is not safe. With the approach of Tomas, which is morphing daily from tropical storm to hurricane and back again, Haitian officials are urging the 7,850 residents of its flagship camp to evacuate and “find different locations.”
Discombobulated Wingnuttery
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If a person is uneducated to such a degree that articulating their political views rationally and coherently is not possible, then emotion is all they can bring to the table. If a person knows little of history and little of the dynamics of human behavior and politics, then any and all arguments that they don’t fully understand are perceived as an assault on their identity.
Playing With God: Terry Jones, Christian Radicalism and 15 Minutes of Fame
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Anthony Samad: Religion without sincerity, reason, or spirituality is not a good look no matter who wears this evil jacket. Evil things happen when people play with God and use political motives to desecrate his word.
So Many Selves, So Little Time
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Michael Sigman: Strangest of all, apoplectic far-Right lunatic Glenn Beck transmogrified — for a day, at least — into Our Savior last week before a throng of some 87,000, according to a CBS News estimate.
Angels and Innocents
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Sikivu Hutchinson: Since God sees and “forgives” everything that is petitioned, the moral universe of children is a tiny, confining funhouse of mirrors. In communities where death at an early age is considered unremarkable by mainstream media and policymakers, the deferment demanded by faith is an insurance policy against social oblivion.
Coffee Time: Reason, Bigotry, and Tea Party Angst
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Charles D. Hayes: Both liberals and conservatives choose relating over reasoning at times, but research shows that conservatives place much more value on in-group loyalty than liberals do. There is plenty of research data to back up this assertion; one doesn’t have to resort to anecdotal evidence of flag waving and lapel pens, although it’s hard not to notice such behavior.
A Teachable Moment: Police Authority and Racism
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President Obama was right the first time when he said the police acted stupidly, because they should know better. It’s unfortunate that the president found it necessary to step back and retract the remark because until we can see this kind of action with some objectivity, we will never learn enough to actually be objective in such matters.
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A “Good Sign” For My Old Kentucky Home
Berry Craig: A Somali man’s request for a permit to establish a place of worship in a small town in Kentucky was turned down because the townspeople claim there wouldn’t be enough parking spaces.