On Saturday, Dec. 13, there’s a classroom shooting at Brown University, in Providence. R.I. Two students are killed, nine others wounded. A day later, in Sydney, Australia – in the midst of a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach – two gunmen fire into the crowd of celebrants. Fifteen people are killed. The shock is global. The grief and anger flow like blood.
Browsing: Opinions
In 1939, Billie Holiday gave voice to a nation’s darkest truths with Strange Fruit, her haunting lament for the bodies of Black men and women hanging from trees in the Southern states. The year before, bluesman Lead Belly had recorded Scottsboro Boys, a ballad chronicling the prosecution of nine Black teenagers falsely accused of rape. At the end of his song, he offered a warning — “stay woke”— a phrase that would enter the Black lexicon as a call to vigilance, a reminder to remain alert to the dangers of racism, especially in the South.
The metaphor “grievant murderers kill to make the nation grieve interprets contemporary mass violence not as a random outburst of pathology, but as a calculated act of psychological warfare. In 2025, this phenomenon evolved into a strategic attempt to force a collective, public trauma upon a society that the perpetrator believes has unjustly marginalized him.
When will the lights truly go off and you Dump Trump?
There is a dangerous misinformation campaign about Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The false narrative that HBCUs are somehow fragile, dependent on foreign students, or lesser-tier institutions was most recently pushed when Donald Trump suggested HBCUs would go out of business without students from China.
It is quite surprising that, for nearly 10 years, millions of people continue to spell MAGA incorrectly. Please let me explain that the correct spelling of MAGA is M-A-F-I-A.
Yellow Springs, Ohio, is the kind of place that makes you smile the moment you step onto its main street. The kind of Main Street Generation X—and every generation before us—assumed would always exist. The kind that, to my children’s generation, now feels less like a living place and more like a memory: something America once built everywhere, and now struggles to protect anywhere.
Knowing The Reason For The Season Keeps Us Prayerful And Thankful.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ adoptive father Joseph and his mother Mary, live in Bethlehem, a town in Judaea near Jerusalem. It is assumed to be their home village. Certain wise men come from “the East” to Herod, the evil King, looking to honor a new ruler they have determined from their study of a bright star that has appeared like a message in the “heavens” is soon to be born.
In countless casual political conversations over the years, I have heard the principle of the “lesser of two evils” invoked, the quiet suggestion that voting is less an act of belief than a calculation of how much damage one is willing to tolerate. Alongside this logic is the familiar refrain that “both parties are the same.” Both frames are reductive and ultimately defeatist. They shrink democracy into a form of harm management rather than collective self-determination and condition citizens to expect disappointment as the price of participation.