A Personal Statement about this Newsletter

I respect all who subscribe and welcome them to a conversation

Let’s face it.  It is just simply human to see the world through various filters and different levels of empathy.  It’s how our thinking and our emotions work.  When it comes to personal life or a local community and we are apathetic or disinterested, we have labels for the behavior.  Negative judgments.  Those of you that know me well, will realize that I try to avoid labels and that much of my teaching career was spent getting students to question the labels that their culture was insisting they apply in their role as citizens in a democratic society. 

So, I won’t insult anyone in this instance with a label.  But I want to point out that the present situation in the Sudan is enough to make any truly sensitive man or women weep this morning.  And have we nearly enough sympathy for the victims of war in Ukraine, let alone the millions of children who go to bed hungry and die of preventable disease in so many parts of the world?

I think of this today as I have been locally attacked by people who think my appointment to our County Health Board would be disastrous and their attacks are personal and challenge my life work as a scholar and educator.  So, I am in danger of feeling sorry for myself.  An example, I suppose, of my own narrow self-absorption!

We need, all of us, at many times in our lives to step back and realize that “it is not about me.”  And take a further step and realize that the fight for freedom and justice and the world as it could be, is truly our duty and our calling, without being “all about us.”    

I have gotten some new local subscribers to this blog who were looking for evidence that I am a communist, or something that would place me outside of “our values.”  When the wagons are circled, the circle is drawn tighter. 

Some of my friends will say I’m foolish to think this way, really “soft headed,” but I hope they will read what I write with sympathy and understanding--that they will consider the ideas with an open mind.  As you know I don’t write this for money or fame.  I just believe that each of us can help make public conversations more interesting and more worthwhile, and this is my contribution.  Have I been wrong, will I be wrong?  Only in being wrong, does something like “the truth” grow clearer, but in the distance.

I try not to preach or disrespect.  If I advocate anything consistently, it is that there is a broad middle of Americans that have found and will find enough agreement on public issues to enact sensible government policies.  We’ve done this in the past.  It is the American way.  I quote Lincoln a lot. 

So my new friends (and all who subscribe to this newsletter I want to know as friends) please read carefully, excuse my excesses and my errors.  And join a conversation where we all have a place at the table.