I talk a lot about these issues. I talk about race and this question of whether we deserve to kill. And it's interesting, when I teach my students about African American history, I tell them about slavery. I tell them about terrorism, the era that began at the end of reconstruction that went on to World War II. We don't really know very much about it. But for African Americans in this country, that was an era defined by terror. In many communities, people had to worry about being lynched. They had to worry about being bombed. It was the threat of terror that shaped their lives. And these older people come up to me now and they say, "Mr. Stevenson, you give talks, you make speeches, you tell people to stop saying we're dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation's history after 9/11." They tell me to say, "No, tell them that we grew up with that." And that era of terrorism, of course, was followed by segregation and decades of racial subordination and apartheid.

And yet, we have in this country this dynamic where we really don't like to talk about our problems. We don't like to talk about our history. And because of that, we really haven't understood what it's meant to do the things we've done historically. We're constantly running into each other. We're constantly creating tensions and conflicts. We have a hard time talking about race, and I believe it's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation. In South Africa, people understood that we couldn't overcome apartheid without a commitment to truth and reconciliation. In Rwanda, even after the genocide, there was this commitment, but in this country we haven't done that.

I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty. It was fascinating because one of the scholars stood up after the presentation and said, "Well you know it's deeply troubling to hear what you're talking about." He said, "We don't have the death penalty in Germany. And of course, we can never have the death penalty in Germany." And the room got very quiet, and this woman said, "There's no way, with our history, we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings. It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people." And I thought about that. What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish? I couldn't bear it. It would be unconscionable.

And yet, in this country, in the states of the Old South, we execute people -- where you're 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white -- in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched. And yet, there is this disconnect.

'What Must Be Said' - Guenter Grass

Here is an unofficial translation of Guenter Grass' poem, "What Must Be Said."

Why do I stay silent, conceal for too long

What is obvious and has been

Practiced in war games, at the end of which we as survivors

Are at best footnotes.

It is the alleged right to the first strike

That could annihilate the Iranian people-

Subjugated by a loud-mouth

And guided to organized jubilation-

Because in their sphere of power,

It is suspected, a nuclear bomb is being built.

Yet why do I forbid myself

To name that other country

In which, for years, even if secretly,

There has been a growing nuclear potential at hand

But beyond control, because not accessible to inspections?

Disabled riders, supporters plead with Port Authority

On a day when getting around was difficult even for the able-bodied, people with disabilities descended in a small army to join other Port Authority riders and supporters at a public hearing Wednesday to protest plans for record-breaking transit service cuts.

Hundreds of people in wheelchairs rolled out of the torrential rain and into the hearing at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown, some just to show support and others to testify against the 35 percent reduction planned for Sept. 2. The reduction, to close a projected $64 million budget deficit, would eliminate 46 of 102 bus routes and cause deep cuts to ACCESS service for the disabled.
"It is just unimaginable that we are going to set people with disabilities back 35 years to the point where they are trapped in their homes," said Lucy Spruill, director of public policy and community relations for United Cerebral Palsy.

Malcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden bombsight

The Pennsylvania gas law fails to protect public health

Dr. Bernard Goldstein is emeritus professor in the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health's Department of Environmental and Occupational Health (www.publichealth.pitt.edu). Jill Kriesky is senior project coordinator at the school's Center for Health Environments and Communities

Gov. Tom Corbett recently signed a bill that goes beyond just ignoring concerns about the potential human health effects of Marcellus Shale drilling, it retains some of the worst aspects of industry secrecy about proprietary hydrofracking chemicals while making unethical demands on physicians.
Imagine a physician caring for a child whose illness might have been caused by long-term exposure to a proprietary fracking chemical while playing near a drill site. Assume that after signing a legally binding nondisclosure agreement, the physician is given the identity of the chemical and comes to believe it caused the illness. What can the physician tell the families of other neighborhood children who play in the same field?
Under the newly enacted law, copied almost verbatim from a controversial Colorado law, a physician may receive information about a proprietary chemical used in the fracking process, but the physician must agree to not reveal this information to the public. The law also allows the company to keep secret from physicians information about agents that come up from the ground during drilling, such as natural gas constituents -- which themselves can be toxic -- and naturally occurring toxic agents such as arsenic, barium, brine components and radioactive compounds dissolved in flowback water. Nor can public health authorities begin with knowledge of a secret chemical and ask whether there is an increase in an illness that the chemical is known to cause.

Michael Steele: "I Wanted a Brokered Convention"

Before he was booted as GOP chair, Steele changed the party's primary contest rules—and now Romney and the Republican establishment are paying for his chaos theory experiment.

—By David Corn

| Mon Mar. 12, 2012 

 

Michael Steele. Neon Tommy/Flickr

Is the never-ending and ever-bitter 2012 Republican presidential race—which at this point seems to be alienating independent voters—Michael Steele's revenge?

Consent of the Governed

DESCRIBING THE UNITED STATES of the 1830s in his now-famous work, Democracy in America, the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville depicted a country passionate about self-governance. In the fifty years since sovereignty had passed from the crown to the people, citizens of the new republic had seized upon every opportunity “to take a hand in the government of society and to talk about it….If an American should be reduced to occupying himself with his own affairs,” wrote de Tocqueville, “half his existence would be snatched from him; he would feel it as a vast void in his life.”
At the center of this vibrant society was the town or county government. “Without local institutions,” de Tocqueville believed, “a nation has not got the spirit of liberty,” and might easily fall victim to “despotic tendencies.”

In the era’s burgeoning textile and nascent railroad industries, and in its rising commercial class, de Tocqueville had already detected a threat to the “equality of conditions” he so admired in America. “The friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed,” he warned, on an “industrial aristocracy….For if ever again permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy make their way into the world it will have been by that door that they entered.” Under those conditions, he thought, life might very well be worse than it had been under the old regimes of Europe. The old land-based aristocracy of Europe at least felt obliged “to come to the help of its servants and relieve their distress. But the industrial aristocracy… when it has impoverished and brutalized the men it uses, abandons them in a time of crisis.”