America
Time.
October 22, 2020
For the first time, the TIME logo on the magazine’s cover has been replaced with another word: VOTE.
This election we decide if we want to keep the America we believe in and hope for, or the America we have become. Choose wisely. Be the bridge.
We are liberal and conservative.
October 10, 2019
“As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”
As I was ushering Marianne into her car, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to see a middle-aged white woman, in tears, asking what she could do to help. She wanted me to know that had never been much interested in politics, but that she had voted for Trump for his fresh, bold outlook. Now she was feeling buyers’ remorse—and hopelessness.
That’s why, she said, she had driven an hour from her home in Portland, Maine to hear Marianne speak: She had been drawn to the core message of heart, community, and patriotic bridge-building.
“America at its best,” the woman said, “is both liberal and conservative.”
What a profound observation. In fact, it’s what all Marianne supporters appreciate: a thriving democracy embraces divergent viewpoints.
Encounters like this—along with that framed quote—are what drive me, working on this campaign to continue our effort to co-create our America.
With warm regards—
Hon. Paul Hodes
New Hampshire State Director
Marianne Williamson for President
‘Now we are living for history.’
November 11, 2016
Farewell, America
No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently.
By Neal Gabler/November 10th, 2016
America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.
W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939
“Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”
We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.
Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them. Like Goebbels before them, conservatives understood that they had to create their own facts, their own truths, their own reality. They have done so, and in so doing effectively destroyed the very idea of objectivity. Trump can lie constantly only because white America has accepted an Orwellian sense of truth — the truth pulled inside out.
With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived.
But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.
We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.
Why our schools must address racial injustice.
July 7, 2016Excellent.
America/The National Catholic Review
‘Opportunities to understand and experience the feelings and worldviews of those who are different from us are becoming more elusive. This month’s shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile have provided yet another set of painful reminders of how different our stories of America can be.’
[…]
‘Today’s university jeopardizes its ability to speak to today’s protestors when it departs from its mission of forming the person. Rising student debt and questionable employment outcomes have caused many families to approach college through a strictly economic lens. In addition there is increasing concern that the identification and cultivation of particular virtues represents a kind of moral paternalism. As a result more aspirational educational goals are pushed to the margins. The hollowing out of the university mission makes it difficult to engage meaningfully with today’s campus protesters. After all, they are not demanding better job training; they are demanding a more inclusive community. This is a deeply moral demand.’
[…]
‘History matters. As Americans, our short memories can be a strength, as we perpetually reinvent ourselves and shake off the past in pursuit of a brighter future. Among the many downsides, of course, is that we can be reluctant to connect present struggles to historical oppression. President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation more than 150 years ago, but that did not end racial oppression in our country. Jim Crow laws provided the framework for a society that was hard-wired for the subjugation and exclusion of blacks. Our criminal justice system has too often contributed to racial disparities through targeted policing, selective prosecution and inequitable sentencing. A post-white-flight lack of economic opportunity in our inner cities has created crushing cycles of poverty. Blacks were largely cut out of the legitimate home mortgage market until the late 1960s. The list goes on. The progress we have made cannot obscure the fact that today’s protesters speak from a centuries-long stream of marginalization.’
http://americamagazine.org/issue/catholic-universities-and-blacklivesmatter