We spoke on the phone. She told me she was raped in downtown Los Angeles and needed a new place to stay. She was uncertain, she didn’t want to commit. I told her I would hold the room without any need for deposit. Frank, my new boyfriend Michael and I cleaned up the room, popped in a futon and burned an incense candle. I took a picture and texted it to her. “It is all set up for you when you are ready.”
She texted back: “<3”.
We are Americans. Ours is a multicultural society. And, we are a proud bunch. It takes focus to be multicultural and American, a kind of cognitive dissonance. Because for a multicultural society to truly prosper, citizens must be consciously willing to accept each other’s diversities, and practice fair and equitable treatment of one another, even when your neighbor’s opinions and actions differ from your own, knowing that though groups may disagree, it doesn’t mean one side is righter than the other, or better than the other, just different.
The Republican candidates for president in 2016, including its deranged nominee, all supported lessening gun regulations, even in the face of repeated mass shootings. Jeb Bush was quoted as saying “stuff happens” in regards to a shooting in Oregon in October of 2015. Donald Trump’s gun policy is for an expansion of gun rights, including concealed carry. In one of the Republican debates, Trump even claimed that he practices concealed carry from time to time, but he does not like to specify when so he can surprise potential assailants.
Almost everyone of a certain age can tell you where they were, and what they were doing, when some kind of horrible news came down the wire. We can’t remember where we put our phones, but we can recall commercial jingles, sports statistics, Oscar winners, and the personal elements of a larger tragedy with relative, often annoying ease. I know exactly where I was, what I was thinking, and what I was doing when the towers went down on September 11th. I remember who I was talking to, when I first heard the reports on Columbine.
Naima Karczmar delves into her family history in part four of her essay series Naming It.
Marcia Krause Bilyk with a stinging, poetic at what it means to be a parents and a child in her experimental non-fiction piece, "Mother's Voice".
Can an ancient philosophy hold the answers to our own fast-paced technological age? Adam Lisabeth explores the good that might be found in the tradition of Stoic Philosophy.
Naima Karczmar continues her raw, honest look at race, identity, and family in her six-part essay, Naming It.
"When she read black Cinderellas into my fairytales, I believed she was lying to me."
Naima Karczmar's moving, personal "Naming It" essay series continues with Part Two: A Catalogue of Incidents.
With the election tearing both parties apart with partisan bickering, M.G. Poe takes a look at just how America became such a politically divided country, and what the future may hold.
