When studying historical documents, it’s fascinating to observe that regardless of how a statement was received at the time it was delivered, messages of truth, integrity and greatness endure through the ages. My French class and I recently examined two speeches of note that were made on June 30, 1960, the day the Congo won…
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl made many trips to the United States. He appreciated the sense of freedom experienced by Americans, but added, “I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” Freedom and responsibility seem to mean different things to…
Trump poured gasoline on the flames of misogyny and racism and put the lives of millions of people at risk
Amer Zahr, a teacher of Islamic law, points out that while eating pork is forbidden, it’s allowed out of necessity in cases of extreme hunger. Zahr is also a Palestinian-American comedian, and in a recent monologue, he stated that in the 2020 presidential election he chose ham over starvation. He has a point. Much of…
Putting the health of the people in the South Caucasus at risk puts us all at risk. Diseases spread and mutate rapidly in refugee camps
When teaching history, it’s rare that an issue more than 100 years old becomes a current events lesson, but that’s what happened as I began teaching about the Armenian Genocide. The Ottoman Empire is responsible for the death of 1.5 million Armenians, primarily under the cover of the First World War. The empire collapsed after…
It’s disturbing to learn that someone in the same profession was murdered while walking home from work. Samuel Paty, who taught a curriculum similar to mine, was beheaded by an extremist outside of Paris on Oct. 16. Paty presented material in previous weeks as part of a study of freedom of speech that some found…
Someone said, ‘Greed is good’ and we repeated it. But the only thing that matters when you die is your legacy
I have to apologize to the youth of the world for the state we find ourselves in. Yes, great things have happened in my lifetime. We watched the fall of the Berlin Wall and we have taken some steps in the progress of human rights. But the legacy of the baby boomer generation leaves little…
Holocaust survivor Eva Kor died in the summer of 2019 while in Poland doing one of the things she found most meaningful: touring a group of young people through the Auschwitz concentration camp. Her message remains: “Each of us has an important part to play in repairing the world. Be the change you wish to…
When a leader suggests he will subvert the democratic process, voters have recourse. We’ve seen it in the Philippines and elsewhere
An apocryphal story circulated in the Philippines in the early 1980s of a dinner party conversation between President Ferdinand Marcos and Catholic Bishop Jaime Sin. Marcos reportedly said, “I really admire those Americans. They know the results of their presidential elections the day of the election.” In response, Sin reportedly said, “Well how about us…
What message do we send dictators and the people who live under their tyranny if we don’t have the courage to live up to our own ideals?
It’s very rare to hear Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson and scholar Noam Chomsky agree on anything but a largely underreported topic brings both ends of the political spectrum together: the Julian Assange affair. In a recent interview, Carlson’s guest Glenn Greenwald pointed out that efforts to silence Assange go back to the administration of…
“We are witnessing America as a failed social experiment,” Ivy League philosopher Cornel West has said. West is not alone in this assessment. Numerous scholars are expressing similar concerns, including University of British Columbia professor Wade Davis, who recently published The Unraveling of America in Rolling Stone magazine. Are we really seeing the end of…