Category

Racism

Voting Rights, Democracy, Hope, Optimism, and the “Arc of the Moral Universe”

V

This morning, Monday morning, March 29, 2021, I woke up in Castiglion Fiorentino as usual and was still thinking about a column I published on Salon.com just over fifteen years ago titled, “What’s the Best Method for a Painless Suicide?”. I still to this day receive an occasional letter about that column, both from people who find solace in it and people who call me mean names...

The Massage Parlor Murders: What can you do?

T

This is not an advice column. This is commentary. Robert Aaron Long, 21 years old, of  Woodstock, Georgia, was arrested Tuesday in the murders of eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent working in massage parlors. Initial media reports indicated that he claimed he did it because he was a sex addict. Sex addiction is not a trivial matter. But right now his claim feels like a...

Trump Holds Up a Bible. America Does a Collective Spit-Take

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Every now and then in his reality show called “The President,” Donald Trump tries a gag that fails. The idea probably came to him in the wee hours when he stews and sweats and tweets. It had a glow, it felt right, the idea of getting up there with a goddam Bible on the church steps, shaking that Bible at people like a stick, that Bible must have looked good to him, this square black bomb made of...

The Knee on the Neck: Watching from a Distance

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Tears come out of my eyes and wet my cheeks and go into my mouth and taste salty. I watch Atlanta’s mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms tell the citizens of Atlanta to go home and I get it. This is no way to blah blah blah I get it, I hear the reason born of pain and oppression and I get it but I would be there too, wouldn’t I, if I were  there. I would also be feeling that enough is enough, fuck it, burn...

Minneapolis

M

I have lived so long with America, with its promise and its shame, with its beauty and its tragedy. I have lived so long now with America’s numbness to its own pain, its impotence, its blindness to its own shame and its own crimes. I have lived so long with this! I am in tears! I am in tears with all the rest of us who have lived with this for so long and have protested and written and spoken and...

Our new friend is a racist — should we dump him?

O

My husband and he have so much in common — but his beliefs are pernicious and wrong! Cary’s classic column from THURSDAY, JAN 3, 2008 Dear Cary, My husband and I live in a small town in the same rural area of northern New England where he grew up. I grew up in a suburban setting in southern New England, but I have lived here my entire adult life — more than three decades now. (I’m 49, my...

Am I being used?

A

Dear Cary: Thank you for bringing humaneness to advice columns. I hope you’ll consider taking time to help me figure out a problem. I was raised in a tribal culture where women keep things to themselves in order to keep others from worrying. I have trouble speaking to friends back home to help me work this out, and I am in a very rural area with no therapists close by. I do not have any...

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