Counteract book bans the easy way: read and share great books — A culture of reading Father’s Day is just about here, and I pause to think of my father. His values on knowledge and reading are my guiding light these days. Such as, how do we stop and counteract all of this censorship nonsense and book banning? How? By promoting a culture of reading in…

There are millions and we are all different — Roll Call — Reginald Dwayne Betts. Martin Espada. Monica Youn. Edgar Lee Masters. Lawrence Joseph. J.P. Howard. The list is long. Millions worldwide. Poets who are also lawyers. Lawyers who are also poets. It feels like it is not a fit but it is for me. Always fit. For many, like Evie Shockley…

My favorite guided spiritual meditation — Many nights, I listen to guided meditations to fall asleep. It is how I am wired. A soft voice to put me in the present and to focus on nothing at all but the immediate. It is how to live. No worries about tomorrow, yesterday, or some bill to pay…

White Supremacists, Of Course. — “Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.” — Derrick Bell Way back in 1995, Derrick Bell, one of the key players in the Critical Race Theory movement, wrote about the attacks on the movement from many different ideological spectrums. This is back when CRT…

Notes on my America — Empires Rise, Empires Fall History tells me empires do fall and crumble. They become lesser nations but they still are a country. Spain and France were empires. Now, they aren’t. The Ottoman empire is likewise gone. This is one reason why the Palestinian question remains unresolved. The Ottomans once had that area in check…

(narrative poetry & poem) — he lives in palestine. texas. my next door neighbor. he’s palestinian. he has never been to palestine, the country, the land, the place of so much of the news. his name is george. his last name is jones. he has lived in palestine all of his life. he is american. palestinian…

(News) — when ‘he’ finally stands & speaks somewhere in the arab peninsula regarding this evil, a shoe will find his face, right between the eyes, or his nose shall become the ten pin in a fancy night of bowl- ing, the way to score a strike, & we know our prez…

Is voting is for suckers? (That would be all of us) — but you have to vote, right? — Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults (65%) say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency. Somehow, I live in a country where the President of the United States gets elected by something called the Electoral College. The…

(How much longer, America?) — kids w/ BIG aZz GUNzzz Key facts about Americans and guns Six-in-ten U.S. adults say gun violence is a very big problem in the country today, up 9 percentage points from spring…www.pewresearch.org