Improvement

Police have killed more than 1000 people per year in the US every year for the past decade. This is a per capita rate of 33 people killed by police violence for every 10 million population, and the rate is higher for our Black residents. Police killings per capita happen at less than half that…

Why does it hurt?

Why does it hurt you that a child who was born biologically male wants to be called Sophia and wear stereotypically female clothes? How does that affect you or your children? How does it change your life?  Why does it hurt for your children to hear a story about a family with two dads or…

Clarity

Do you want to know the truth? Or do you want your truth accepted by others? Are you seeking, or are you asserting? Are you speaking, always working The angle, searching for the advantage? You wear your certainty like a badge of honor, But pretending you understand what you do not Will not prove your…

Pork Chop

When you tell me something works, I ask, "Who for, by what measures, and at what cost?" Stock buy-backs, smelting furnaces, corporate bailouts, and CAFOs work for some of us but not the sum of us.  If your bargain saves me a dollar on a pork chop but costs me my soul, was it worth…

Transmuting domination into liberation

In our culture, we venerate power. Perhaps many cultures do, but ours seems particularly fascinated with it. When we see a problem, we tend to approach it through domination. We place international struggles in the frame of military conflict. We immediately handle social problems like crime through increases in policing. Parenting is viewed through the…

Failure of imagination

I can’t imagine my own child living far from home, forced to work to provide for their own living or to send money back to us so that we can survive. Packaging chips, baking granola bars, cutting meat, doing whatever is required by the adults who are their guardians, whether in their best interest or…

Repair without shame

“Back the Blue.” “All Cops Are Bastards.” Both of these slogans generalize a particular conclusion about police. Either we reflexively defend or attack all individual police officers. I can’t agree with statements that define everyone in a particular group as the same. Police officers make mistakes. They break the law. They are honorable. They care…

Twisting the arrow

The movement of the second hand on the clock heightens my sense that time is a scarce resource. I often feel like I am running out of time, like I am competing against the clock. One of my highest enacted values is accomplishing a task in the shortest amount of time, or accomplishing more things…

Connection > End

I have struggled with a fear of death since I was a child. When I was about 13 years old, I went through a period where death was my first thought when I woke up each morning. I know that fearing death is natural and as close to a universal human experience as exists, but…

A fictitious letter about AP African American Studies

Members of the College Board:  We received your recent application to import your Advanced Placement African American Studies class into the great state of Florida. We appreciate your desire to spread your woke ideologies throughout the country, and especially to bring them to God-fearing Floridians.  However, those Floridians of the white race are constitutionally unable…