Once again, it’s 9/11. Somehow, the observance seems dampened this year, with yet another spin around the sun between us and the tragedy. Yet the currents that led to the event still swirl through our world. I’ve written in past years about working next door to the World Trade Center until two business days before the tragedy. This year, I turn to others’ words — words of poets.
Many of us who have any sense of social justice — nay, of humanity — are angry, outraged, and saddened by the shooting death of Michael Brown, a Black teenager in Missouri. I find myself once again scared for my son’s friends who are Black. I find myself hoping I can raise my son, who is White, to be a strong ally and help continue to erase the racism in our world. I hope I can be a good role model in that regard.
My thoughts go out today to the community of Troutdale, Oregon, where a student and a suspected shooter are both dead after the later opened fire at Reynolds High School. When 27 people died after a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut two years ago, ABC News reported that there had been 31 school shootings since the one in Columbine, Colorado in 1999. Now, we learn that there have been 74 school shootings since Newtown. How many is too many?
(This was originally published last week as my Mombian newspaper column.)
A safe and successful Boston Marathon one year from the one that broke all our hearts.
Michael Morones is an 11-year-old boy living in North Carolina. He loves My Little Pony, in part because he has ACHD and relates to the character Pinkie Pie, an excitable pony. Schoolmates bullied him and called “gay” for liking a “girls'” program, however. He is now in critical condition in the hospital after a suicide attempt.
Another school shooting. Another school shooting, this time in New Mexico, where an 12-year-old boy on Tuesday sawed off a shotgun and shot two classmates, ages 12 and 13, before being restrained by a teacher. The classmates are alive, but one is in critical condition. Right after the Sandy Hook shootings, I wrote about some of
I hugged my son today, thinking of those who have lost theirs. It’s been one year since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. One year — and yesterday, there was another, as a high school student in Colorado opened fire with a shotgun and incendiary devices and critically injured a fellow student.
The scale of the disaster in the Philippines caused by Super Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda is almost beyond imagining. The latest count is 10,000 dead and over 600,000 displaced by the strongest storm to make landfall in recorded history. As we enter a season when many of us are already called on to make charitable donations, I hope many of us will find a few extra dollars to donate to one or more of the organizations leading relief efforts. Here’s how to find them.
Like many, I am deeply saddened and disturbed by the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. My wish now, in the aftermath of the verdict, is that we as a country use this as an opportunity to build bridges, not barriers.
