When Will We Ever Learn?
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Random Blogging on August 26th, 2010
There was an anti-war song from the sixties that I always loved, titled “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The refrain was “oh, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?” I’ve thought about that refrain a lot lately, as America has increasingly retreated into one of the ugliest nativist episodes in a [...]
Paging Civics Teachers
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Constitution, Education / Youth on August 23rd, 2010
Where are all the high-school civics teachers when you need them? During the past few weeks, we have been treated to an absolute bonanza of constitutional ineptitude: we’ve had Dr. Laura explaining her departure from radio as an effort to get her First Amendment rights back; continuation of the ugly, ginned-up controversy over Muslims building [...]
Mirror Images
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Random Blogging on July 31st, 2010
There must be a special blind spot that allows people to engage in precisely the same behavior that they (correctly) criticize in others. In one particularly distasteful example, the Anti-Defamation League, an organization founded to counter religious prejudice, recently opposed locating a mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero. Evidently, the ADL’s commitment to civil [...]
Toxic Times
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Gay Rights on July 28th, 2010
I returned to Indianapolis after a week of being blessedly unconnected to “the usual suspects”—otherwise known as the media/chattering classes/punditocracy—to find that the National Organization for Marriage had been through town. Some forty “pro-marriage” demonstrators had promoted loving relationships with signs suggesting that gay people should be murdered. One particularly nasty poster featured a picture [...]
Game-Playing
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Random Blogging on July 28th, 2010
When I was growing up, parents and teachers used to tell us “it isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” Honor was a higher goal than winning. Playing fair, displaying sportsmanship, generosity in winning and gallantry in losing were the goals. Adults worthy of our admiration and respect were those [...]
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