The public reaction to 17-year-old Brendan Depa’s assault of Joan Naydich at Matanzas High School is mostly compassionate and balanced. The more strident reaction among elected officials–the State Attorney, school board members–is not not. Elected officials are not only exploiting the situation. They’re exploiting Depa. They want blood.
American Impressions 1 | The Day Before America
In the first of nine installments of his American Impressions series–a reporter’s journey across the 50 states–Pierre Tristam fills in details that marked his youth in war-torn Lebanon and defined his outlook before migrating to the United States and beginning a process of discovery that continues to this day.
The Christian Arrogance Behind Praying Coach’s Supreme Court Case
Christian coach Joseph Kennedy’s prayer at a public school football field’s 50-yard line is not about religious freedom. It is not about God. It is not even about praying. It’s about imposing one version of Christianity in an increasingly pluralist society in one of the last places where that kind of favoritism has no place. It is intolerance by exclusivity.
My Son Leaves
Today’s the day. We’re taking our son to UCF. There will be bleakness. This day has been hurtling toward us since he was born. It was once a distant meteor, invisible to the naked heart. But impact is today at 3:30 p.m.
An American Tragedy: The Roe Regression
In right-to-life theology, the woman’s right is non-existent. She’s a vessel. Pro-life? It might help us to look beneath our legal and social burquas once in a while. It’s not pretty, and it sure as hell isn’t nearly as moral or pro-life as you think.
Yes, Current Rules Give Transgender Women Athletes an Unfair Advantage. But Bans Aren’t the Answer.
There is something unfair about Lia Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania star swimmer and transgender woman, winning races and breaking records, and there is something rational in calls by some of her competitors–and by some transgender athletes themselves–for a rule change that addresses both fairness and inclusion.
The GOP Is Using ‘Parental Rights’ to End Public Education as We Know It
The Florida GOP is using the Parents’ Bill of Rights to weaponize a minority of insurrectionist parents against schools, giving parents the right to violate privacy and autonomy where it counts most at school: between students and teacher. No wonder there’s a teacher exodus. It’s just what the GOP wants. Destruction from within.
Americanisms: Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and Babbitt
Today we read the Sinclair Lewis of “Main Street,” “Babbitt,” “Elmer Gantry” and “It Can’t Happen Here” not for literary value but the way Margaret Mead studied the Balinese character–for ethnographic insights. Lewis’s novels are a window into an America not nearly as dated as his reputation.
Eulogy for Nature: Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire,” published in January 1968, worthy of any top-100 list of the best books of the last hundred years and an essential read–and re-read-today, is a meditation, a polemic, a manifesto, a provocation, a valentine and an elegy to the red desert and to American wilderness.
Our Thirty Years’ War: Schlesinger’s The Disuniting of America
What historian Arthur Schlesinger had detected in 1992 in a few trends is now orthodoxy–from both sides, neither for the better. The “ethnic rage” of diversity-preaching liberals and the fundamentalist, doctrinaire “monoculturalism” of conservatives has the country in a state of paralysis. Schlesinger wanted a renewed melting pot. But that’s not the solution.