Recent killings show that the police should be retrained as peace officers. They should defuse tense situations without killing anyone, and provide assistance to people in crisis. Smart phones have exposed outrageous actions and lies by some cops, yet the outrages still occur. Does a Black life really matter? Militarized police forces and mass incarceration look and feel like an occupying army. Trust in our police is low for many Americans, leading to calls for less funding.  Most police officers have been in the military, where they learned how to…

I graduated from high school in Washington, DC, and worked on the Hill in my twenties.  The Capitol can be seen from miles away.  It is also a beacon from the first Democracy to the world.   America now looks like one of the banana republics that we created throughout Latin America.  Our nation has overthrown many foreign governments using similar assault tactics by mobs.   The red hat insurrection at the Capitol looked like a “color revolution.”  The Orange Revolution in Ukraine was encouraged and probably funded by our government.  Was…

2020 is one of those years that will be remembered in history books. The deadly global pandemic, the lockdown of societies and economies, going inward, zooming outwards, racism and BLM, an election, divisive polarity, Biden/Harris winning, and the hope of recovery and moving forward. This year has been tragic with over 330,000 Americans who have sadly lost their lives to COVID. I send my heart-felt condolences to their loved ones who are grieving during the holidays.  About 20 million Americans have been infected and survived, sometimes barely. They feared for their lives, as…

I’m from Brooklyn. In my part of Brooklyn, everything was interactive. Whether your ethnic group was Puerto Rican or African or African–American or German or Chinese or Thai or Yemeni, our part of Brooklyn actually encouraged you to talk to each other. As a family we were – and still in many ways are – Italian, even those of us who can no longer speak Italian. Being Italian means being vociferous, which is to say having opinions and being eager, watchful, and alert to the possibility of expressing those opinions…