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Anahorish, Anna Deavere Smith, Anna Deavere Smith, Anna Deavere Smith, Art, Awesome Women, Great Advice, Human Rights, Justice, Language matters, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Oprah Winfrey, Peace, Phoenix, Politics, Prop 300, Punishment, Seamus Heaney, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Theater
a walk in other people’s shoes, other people’s words
Every afternoon at 3 0’clock, for the first twenty-five years of my American life, I sat down on my couch and watched Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. It was Oprah who taught me Gavin de Becker’s “The Gift of Fear” and later, if ever I were kidnapped, that I should remember Sanford Strong’s Rule #1: to never let myself be taken…
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Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Governor Jan Brewer, Immigration, Memoir, Politics, Racial Profiing, SB1070, Seamus Heaney, Sectarianism
SB 1070 & the music of what happens
It was just three years ago. I was sitting in my office, only half-enjoying a visit from a former student – each of us was tense, awaiting Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s announcement regarding SB1070. Surely she would do the humane and right thing? Surely she would refuse to sign an insidious and un-American piece of legislation that would criminalize undocumented…
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Borders, Bruce Springsteen, DREAM Act, Human Rights, Kai Wiedenhöfer, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Photography
achtung baby . . . if walls could talk.
I always thought Robert Frost was right to ask so plainly in a poem we had to memorize for school, why it was that good fences make good neighbors: Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn’t love…
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From the Republic of Conscience, Human Rights, Loss, Nelson Mandela, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Cure at Troy, Themes of Childhood, Writing
nelson mandela – once in a lifetime
Men and women, all over the world, right down the centuries, come and go. Some leave nothing behind, not even their names. ~ Nelson Mandela Nelson Mandela is gravely ill tonight with reports coming out of Pretoria, South Africa that he is on life support. He is at the end of his life, frail at 94, but in my mind’s…
