Yesterday's Question
What is your favorite Memorial Day activity? Attend a Memorial Day Program 15.69% Have a picnic or barbecue 17.65% Go to the park 1.96% Go out to eat 1.96% Stay at home and rest 38.24% Something else 24.51%
Political violence should not become acceptable
A society that begins to excuse political violence should not be surprised when political violence multiplies. Once you create a moral framework in which violence is not merely understandable but righteous – once you argue that certain institutions are so corrupt, so "murderous," that the people who participate in them deserve to be killed – you are no longer condemning violence. You are licensing it. And when that cultural permission structure meets a criminal justice system increasingly designed to favor perpetrators over victims, the results are predictable: more ...
There's fragile balance between compassion, civilization
What is unfolding across parts of Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom under Keir Starmer, should serve as a warning to every Western democracy wrestling with questions of immigration, national identity, social cohesion and the limits of political tolerance. A nation can be compassionate without becoming careless. It can welcome newcomers while still expecting assimilation, civic responsibility and respect for the laws and traditions that hold a society together. But when governments become so consumed with appearing morally virtuous that they neglect order, border ...
What's so bad about stable population?
Back in 1969, President Richard Nixon warned Congress against the rapid growth of the American population: "When future generations evaluate the record of our time, one of the most important factors in their judgment will be the way in which we responded to population growth." If the American headcount continued rising at the current rate, Nixon said, the nation's "social supplies – the capacity to educate youth, to provide privacy and living space, to maintain the processes of open, democratic government -- may be grievously strained." Since 1969, America's population has ...
Loss of a giant
Hundreds packed a New York synagogue last week to mourn the death of longtime Anti-Defamation League head Abraham Foxman, but also to celebrate his life. A child of the Holocaust, miraculously hidden from the Nazis by his Catholic nanny, only to be equally miraculously reunited with his parents after the Nazis were defeated, Abe Foxman emigrated to America and became a civil rights lawyer. For decades, he was both the face and the embodiment of the fights against anti-Semitism, making the ADL as well a powerful advocate for civil rights broadly. Whoever coined the ...
Americans love their cars, their road trips
Since the first American road, the Lincoln Highway, opened in 1913, Americans have found that their relationship with their nation and the roads that connect us north, south, east and west is almost patriotic in concept. Whether you are on the road for hours or days, whether you stay in your home state or visit multiple others, there is a breadth of history, scenery and experiences that connect all of us, whether we stay ensconced with our families in our cars or stay in campgrounds with a community fire ring, or at a motor lodge, or if you just take a day trip to the local ...