I’m still in Appleton, Wisconsin as I write, awaiting my second cataract surgery, right eye, tomorrow. The first one went well. I’m not concerned about number two, at least not in and of itself. But I’ve felt myself plunging into a sense of deeper stress, feeling, with increasing regularity – as I stay here with my loving family – like a shrug of nobody.
Browsing: Opinions
Who are these aliens living in America that the Republicans speak of with such disdain and contempt? Are they invaders from a foreign land? Are they creatures from another planet? No. The aliens Republicans often vilify are human beings-men, women, and children-who may look, speak, or pray differently than what they consider “American.”
Being “Dad” to my daughter Amari, who was diagnosed with autism, changed everything. In the Black community, silence around disability comes at a cost. I’ve learned that fatherhood is leadership—and it’s time we speak up. Our kids need early support, inclusive policies, and visible, vocal fathers. Autism isn’t the tragedy—silence is.
The signing of The Declaration of Independence had nothing to do with people of color as we were enslaved by some of those who signed the historic document.
In 2020, as the nation reckoned with systemic racism in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the U.S. Department of Defense took a long-overdue step: initiating the process to rename military bases that bore the names of Confederate generals — men who fought to preserve slavery and divide the Union.
This Independence Day, Remember Fighting Back is America’s Great Tradition
It’s late afternoon, and most of the cars are pulling out of the parking lot behind a nondescript office building in Whippany, New Jersey, as I arrive. Our small group has been gathering here since March, so we know the drill. After some quick greetings, we pop our trunks and unload. There are flags, banners, signs, bungee cords, rolls of tape, noisemakers, and, most important of all, letters. A stack of black, 20-by-30-inch foam boards, each bearing a single white letter, has been carefully prearranged to spell out the day’s message.
In the aftermath of the U.S. government’s military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it is easy to assume that Iran and the United States will never come to diplomatic terms over Iran’s nuclear future. President Donald Trump reportedly decided to launch the strikes partly because he had become increasingly frustrated with Iran for not responding to the latest proposal for a nuclear deal.
Following Trump’s comment, other less grand assessments of the US strikes have been offered, ranging from “enormous damage” and “severe damage” to the Ayatollah Ali Khomeini’s insistence that “nothing at all” was seriously damaged. Accompanying these assessments of what bombing accomplished are wide-ranging predictions of how badly Iran’s nuclear program has been set back: a few months, several months, several years. All these assessments and predictions obscure a simple fact: Iran still has the human and technical resources to produce a nuclear weapon at some point in the future, and now with greater incentive than ever to do so.
Liberalism is the political and social philosophy that promotes democracy, freedom, civil liberties, and limited government intervention. The goal of Christian Nationalism is to restrict freedom and civil liberties through government intervention. And so Christian Nationalism is fundamentally opposed to Liberalism. In this context, one can understand the hate-filled anti-liberal rhetoric of the Christian right. But it is liberalism’s freedoms that made America a great nation. Restricting freedom diminishes us.