We, The People…

One day, when we look back on our lives, we will be defined by the way we behaved in this moment.

• • •

Rules of Civility

I was just a kid April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in my hometown. My family – mom, dad, my younger brother Robert, and my baby sister Monica – were in the dining room finishing dinner when I rushed in from the TV room to announce the news. Both my parents had grown up in the east, in Brooklyn, but they’d lived in the south long enough to know a thing or two about race relations, and were savvy enough about “the times” to understand King’s assassination would be a momentous event, that it might change everything.

• • •

Who Loves Ya, Baby?

The true origins of celebrating the notion of romantic love on February 14 are not well documented, though the exchange of elaborate, handmade gifts between paramours was well established by the middle of the eighteenth century in England, and began to really take off in the United States once Esther Howland (herself now considered something of a saint by the American Greeting Card Association) began selling mass-produced Valentine’s cards in the 1840s.

• • •

Another One Bites The Dust

Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, head of the Pakistan People’s Party, and the most credible challenger to the rule of Pakistan’s current military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, was assassinated yesterday in Rawalpindi, outside the capital city of Islamabad.

• • •