We actually have patriots gleaming with prophetic light.
There was deep elation in abundant corners of America yesterday as Joe Biden announced that Sen. Kamala Harris is his choice for a running mate in the coming presidential election. In this nadir of our national suffering and reckoning, a burst of light broke through the unrelenting clouds that hang over us–from the unforgiving pandemic to the trembling clamor for racial justice. I am throwing nostalgia away–it is a...
It’s still America.
OCEANSIDE, Ca: I am presenting this missive during the thickly arduous days of mid-summer, 2020. Our nation is gripped by immersed disease, painful racial reckonings, and a suffocating lack of thoughtful leadership. Because we are so crushingly interconnected, wired, opinionated, and free, our national tendency to bewail and even condemn ourselves sometimes weighs us down with self-flagellation and remorse and some sense that we are...
With virtual Baseball comes a base-hit of American hope.
Foul ball: like everything else, Baseball has had to adjust, as best it can, to the dreary realities of 2020. Ejection from game: the Miami Marlins have already suffered a multiple outbreak of COVID-19 and can only hope that the players affected and others threatened will all be okay. But the precarious opening of the 2020 “season” calls for a reflection on all that is enduring about the game itself. Players and fans...
John Lewis, the “boy from Troy.”
[Revised and edited edition.] John Lewis, a sharecropper’s son, will lie in state this week under the rotunda of the United States capitol. As a seventeen-year-old lad from the gravely impoverished Troy, Ala., John Lewis decided to write a letter to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery. Lewis had breathlessly followed the recent narrative there of King, Rosa Parks, and others during the successful eleven-month Montgomery...
Rev. C.T. Vivian, a sweet lion, is free at last.
[Even as this column was sent out, we now mourn the death of John Lewis. The Civil Rights Movement has two new stars shining in the night.] SAN DIEGO–Sometime in the blistering heat of 1965, while Martin Luther King, Jr. and his allies were marching for the nation’s first inclusive voting rights bill, a wiry, feisty, articulate Baptist minister stood up to the condescending white sheriff of Dallas County—which encompasses Selma,...