The people's voice of reason
The people's voice of reason
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Had she lived, the Queen of Soul would have been 80-years-old in March. For at least 60 of her 76 years, Aretha Franklin shared her vocal gift all over the world. In addition to bringing her both critical and commercial success, her voice became a symbol for a new generation of Americans. Older generations rooted in staid and static smugness frowned upon popular culture for breeding new forms of entertainment and activism, which promoted an expression of unique, differing and contrasting ideas....
Eighty years ago this month, with the stroke of a pen, President Franklin Roosevelt in Executive Order 9066 effectively relegated 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps. Many of these American citizens were afforded no rights to object to their removal, and there was no procedure to prove loyalty to the United States. These citizens were interned solely because of their ancestry, nothing else. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, there was widespread fear that the Empire of Japan might...
One vision of utopia includes the conversion of weapons of war into farming implements. The Bible anticipates a time when swords will be beaten into plowshares, and spears will become pruning hooks. But sometimes in our modern world, it happens that bitter enemies with blood on their respective hands wake up and realize that compromise is better than conflict. Overcoming hate is less about love and more about recognizing the reality of the devastating consequences of protracted conflict. When...
This article recalls the Philippines off-year election in 1951. It is a little known story about how the good guys avoided a communist take-over. Regrettably, these lesson were forgotten in Vietnam some 10 years later. I hope Alabama Gazette readers will find it of interest. Seventy years ago, the Philippines came within a whisper of being the pre-game for Vietnam. But much like the dog that didn’t bark or the accident that didn’t happen, few people appreciate how close the Philippines came to...
As Thanksgiving morphs into Christmas, the December television schedule will be filled with the usual assortment of Christmas classics, not the least of which is Frank Capra’s: It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen his movie and unlike some classics that are tiresome, Wonderful Life always grabs me. The idea of selfless giving is made manifest when the entire community comes to George Bailey’s aid. I think every small business owner secretly views his business...
In the blood sport of electoral politics losers are forgotten and rarely rewarded; in British politics even winners experiencing their peak of success can be defeated. As a result, dealing with the humiliation of loss and muddling through toward future success is perhaps the hallmark of a successful leader. Winston Churchill’s come from behind win 70 years ago this month ranks among history’s greatest political resurrections, but this accomplishment, improbable as it was at the time, is swe...
Experience is the practical scientific method. Some things succeed while other things fail; observing the reasons for success should help draft a blueprint for planning the future. It may be vogue to regard the past as nothing more than a sentimental embrace of the pre-modern world, but the laboratory of human conflict yields tangible results that can be examined, quantified and reviewed to consider best practices. What can we learn when the autocrat’s autocrat allows a form of pluralism that i...
Imagine your football team is in the first quarter of a game, a couple of star players are sidelined and the opponent’s offense seems unstoppable. The score is already 28-0 when your head coach takes a time out. He lets his assistants coach up the team while he meets with an architect to design a new stadium to display championship trophies and meets with another head coach to discuss developing a new conference with more efficient rules to increase attendance and enthusiasm for the game. S...
Few calendars in this part of the Western Hemisphere will note it, but on July 28, Peru celebrates 200 years of independence. Two centuries of anything is a big deal; it demonstrates generational resilience and that’s something to celebrate. But the occasion also offers us cause to examine, and understand the international, liberating forces unleashed by the success of American Independence, how these ideas permeated through other nations to create a culture of liberty and freedom, and the l...
If the 4th of July has a pre-game, it is June 15th. On that date in 1215, the Magna Carta was signed, beginning a gradual process of defined individual rights and limiting the power and authority of the British crown. The Declaration of Independence, which outlined the colonists’ desire for freedom from the edicts of King George, is a direct descendant of the Magna Carta. It would be foolish to argue that the Magna Carta anticipated all the rights and freedoms we enjoy today, but it certainly p...
Always the catch-all political crime, an accusation of treason is used to punish rivals and remove them from civic engagement. Autocrats use the insinuation of treason with brutal efficiency to banish, if not execute, a political problem or inconvenient idea. While treason is bandied about to characterize someone with whose political beliefs we disagree, our founders made treason a particularly difficult crime to prove. As with so much of the Constitution, the terms were specifically written to...
When great powers stump their toe on foreign policy, the initial pain, though slight, often causes loss of focus, a stumble, and sometimes a more serious accident. Sixty years ago, the United States sponsored an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba, and the colossal failure ultimately damaged our nation’s reputation, emboldened our enemies, worried our allies, and clouded our vision of proper objectives for foreign relations. President John Kennedy’s inauguration was a cause for much optimism as a you...
There has been much debate lately about how we name public buildings and whether we should remove some names because of long ago actions that no longer conform to contemporary societal practices. Public buildings are always tricky to name as evidenced by the fact that just a couple of years ago, the University of Alabama Law School was named after Hugh Culverhouse, Jr. in acknowledgment of a very generous donation. However, Culverhouse’s donation was later returned and his name was chiseled f...
We take freedom of conscience for granted, but, 500 years ago, accepting and practicing beliefs outside of the mainstream was deadly. The 1521 Diet of Worms was a legislative gathering held in Worms (one of the oldest cities in Europe) to consider Martin Luther’s theology. The stakes were extraordinarily high as Luther, a mere monk, parried with the leading Roman Catholic scholars of his day. The ramifications of this meeting, while couched in religious terms, had clear political u...
Thirty years ago, the world seemed like a more stable place. The United States was at the height of international prowess and had deftly negotiated with almost the entire world to oust Sadam Hussein from Kuwait. President Bush and his foreign policy team had built an international coalition to acknowledge that aggression against another sovereign state would not be tolerated. Even those countries that did not physically participate in the military coalition agreed to refrain from public dissent...
It was President Harry Truman who said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know,” and King Solomon, perhaps the wisest man ever, stated pretty much the same thing a few millennia ago when he recorded in Ecclesiastes 1:9 that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Recent studies have shown the people look fondly upon the era that was one to two decades prior of their birth as the “good old days,” but few take time to really examine what made those days so seemingly g...
The Enduring Legacy of Margaret Thatcher Thirty years ago, [the week of November 23rd], the longest serving British prime minister of the 20th century resigned. Margaret Thatcher, having governed since 1979, saw her leadership challenged, but rather than continue to fight, she was gaslighted into believing she was losing her grip on her party and would lose her office in an embarrassing vote. None of that was true. In fact, the very men who rode to leadership positions on her coattails and hid...
Eighty years ago this week, hurricane season ended when the Royal Air Force won the Battle of Britain by stopping the Nazi war machine at the edge of the English Channel. Before the summer of 1940, Hitler had derided Great Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. Göring’s seemingly superior Luftwaffe pilots were outdone by the young British RAF, aided by friendly forces—not the least of which was a squadron of Polish pilots. They had shown the world that the Nazi juggernaut could be countered through...