Tag: Society
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Reluctant Empathy and Old Ideas
I’ll go to my corner now that I’ve had my little tantrum after writing something that was more catalyst than conviction. Later in the day when I was on my way to collect the resident teen from his spot at the curb after school, I heard the man I’d been watching earlier on television ask […]
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Dear Bakersfield Board of Education Members…
NaBloPoMo: I’m on it with a little hop in my step and a “tally-ho” spirit, raring to go. Onward and upward, and all that sort of rot. To quote my sister when she was very young and we had suffered yet another family trip crammed in the back of the blue VW bug, “Are we […]
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Get Out Your Deflector Shields
Yanno, I was going to have a lovely, quiet morning. Feh. After a much needed eleven hours of sleep last night (evacuated relatives, non-stop fire coverage, no school, no work, and a busy Las Vegas weekend) I stretched, poured my coffee and began to plan my day. Fire coverage is dwindling (thankfully and finally), the […]
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Observations on ambivalence
ambivalent (adj.) having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone… Yesterday late in the afternoon, I received an email referencing this piece. I’ve read it several times since, and caught myself mulling over aspects of it. Politeness. Authority. Acculturation and silence. Self-negation. But Verlyn Klinkenborg’s piece is about writing, isn’t it? He acknowledges […]
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Birthdays Boys and Paradoxical Sunsets
I could mull over the paradox that is “America’s Finest City,” or what I lovingly refer to as Paradise: palm trees and NIMBY pettiness; temperate climes and a questionable, tenacious city attorney; luxury housing and chronic homelessness; or cutting edge schools and an on-going disparity in achievement between African American and Latino students, and Caucasian […]
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Whining in the Men’s Room
A few days ago, our local paper ran Ellen Goodman’s piece on “The male-dominated blogosphere” where she spent three columns questioning why the “forceful, sometimes demagogic, message-monger organizing tool for the progressive end of the Democratic Party” has “chief messengers [who] are overwhelmingly men — white men, even angry white men.” Hmmm…sounds like nobody chose […]