Author: Carma Henry

Carma Lynn Henry Westside Gazette Newspaper 545 N.W. 7th Terrace, Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33311 Office: (954) 525-1489 Fax: (954) 525-1861

    While many of us are cutting back on groceries, travel, health care and other necessities to pay almost five bucks a gallon for gas (more than $5/gallon in some states), oil companies are raking in mega bucks. According to the politically centrist publication, The Hill, since President Trump started the war with Iran the world’s eleven largest oil companies are earning about 30 million dollars every hour. That comes to $720 million a day or more than $5 billion every week. Feeling ripped off? You should, but the price you pay at the pump is only what you see and feel. A lot of your tax dollars go to Big Oil too.

     Long before researchers coined phrases like “food insecurity” or “food apartheid,” Black congregations were feeding families abandoned by segregated systems, economic inequality and government neglect. But a new generation of faith leaders is asking a harder question: What if the church stopped merely responding to hunger and started confronting the system producing it?

During a Special School Board Meeting, members of the Broward County School Board presented a proclamation honoring the life, vision, and enduring legacy of Levi Henry Jr. to the Henry family and staff of the Westside Gazette, recognizing his lifelong commitment to community service, leadership, and advocacy throughout Broward County and beyond.

       At 46 years old, I’ve lived long enough to know that silence is rarely accidental. It’s often a choice, one shaped by comfort, fear, exhaustion, or the belief that what’s happening doesn’t quite touch our front door yet. I’ve also learned this: silence has a sound. You may not hear it immediately, but over time it echoes, carrying consequences far beyond the moment we chose not to speak.

       Too many Black people heard truth come from Malcolm’s mouth yet discounted truth because it could not be right, it came from “a non-believer;” from someone not baptised in the faith, in Eurocentric Christianity. Beset by classical conditioning, beaten through the body into maimed minds, the African that left many doors of no return, survived horrible slave ships in crossing the Atlantic Ocean to centuries of chattel slavery, years of Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws, legal discrimination, drugs and mass incarceration, heard truth and found a way to run from it, to hide somewhere in no man’s land, to so-called freedom!

   The Trump administration’s move to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III marks a major shift for the medical cannabis industry, with implications for taxation, research, insurance coverage, and patient access. While marijuana remains federally illegal unless Congress acts, the new classification recognizes accepted medical use and lowers regulatory barriers.