Browsing: Opinions

     When federal agents arrested journalist Don Lemon and independent reporter Georgia Fort in connection with a protest inside a Minneapolis-area church, many commentators framed the incident as a straightforward defense of sacred space. Worship was disrupted. Congregants were frightened. Law enforcement restored order.

     We keep Black History Month on one shelf and Valentine’s Day on another. One is supposed to be about pain and struggle. The other about flowers and pastel sugary hearts. Public remembrance of the most important Supreme Court decision about love in American history—Loving v. Virginia—waits for June, as if love itself were a summer excursion. 

     Why has ICE become a national flashpoint even for people who are not at immediate risk of deportation? The answer isn’t simply immigration policy. It is legitimacy. Under this administration, enforcement has become a public language of governance—highly visible, often forceful, and paired with thinner transparency and weaker restraint.

     Which brings us directly to Tillich’s varieties of angst, all three of which coat with a thick paralyzing sludge the insane assumptions of nuclear deterrence. We assume nine nuclear powers can go on forever without making a fatal mistake. We assume that 900 nuclear weapons make us more secure than 600 nuclear weapons, and if another country has 1200 nuclear weapons, we cannot be secure unless we can field 1600. We build; they build. The masters of war achieve prosperous quarterly returns as the Union of Concerned Scientists keeps moving the Doomsday clock closer to zero. 

     On January 27, 2026, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds to midnight―the closest setting, since the appearance of the clock in 1946, to nuclear annihilation.