Just a thought. . .

Sam Smith - Writing to a friend recently, I noted that there was a strange similarity between those like myself in our 80s and teenagers, namely that our society can't figure out how to deal with either of us. It has slowly been dawning on me that 80 somethings are not considered particularly necessary or …

The Civil War hangs on

Sam Smith – Some time ago I raised the issue of who had really won the civil war. True, slavery and the confederacy are over, but other practices and values of the old South – particularly the purported superiority of the white male - remain with us, expanded to not only to subjugate blacks but …

Ghosts

Sam Smith With Philadelphia a formal feeling came. Our house on Schoolhouse Lane was old and big and dark and tall and Victorian and sat back from the street on several acres. Other large buildings lay alongside and there was nothing in the untended hayfields across the street. The shutters were dark green, the stucco …

The diversity of diversity

Sam Smith - One aspect of diversity that doesn't get enough attention is its diversity. With considerable help from the mediaand the voices it cites, we learn that we are black, white or Hispanic, gay or straight, religious or atheist. . . and so forth.  A number of aspects of my life have caused me …

Putting the good before God

 Sam Smith – News that Harvard has selected an atheist as its lead chaplain brought real joy to my life because I have long considered myself an existentialist – including not opposing the good causes of religion but rather its general tendency to put faith ahead of them. Harvard’s Greg Epstein described it well in …

The numbers they don’t talk about

Sam Smith - Obsessed with race as a topic, even progressive Americans fail to deal with numbers that could bring fair minded ethnic groups far closer together, namely the number of those in poverty.  Interestingly, 14.2 million of these folks are white as opposed to 8.1. black and 9.5 latino yet one seldom hears discussion …

A demi-decade of disaster

Sam Smith – The past five years have been among the worst in our history. Add four years of the Trump regime to the pandemic to the GOP efforts to undermine voting rights to the attempted coup at the Capitol and we have seldom been faced collectively with so many problems we are unable to …

Escaping our politics of myths & lies

Sam Smith - Myth and lie-based politics have been around for a long time before Trump. In its modern, dominant form, the Nixon administration is a good place to start. The Clintons' ability to conceal the reality of the Arkansas mob politics which they had led was another example as was the major dishonesty about …

Confessions of a positive cynic

 To those who can’t figure out how someone like your editor, whom Marion Barry once called a “cynical cat,” can favor, for example, the positive teaching of multiculturalism over only telling the history of racism, this excerpt from an article I wrote in 2000 helps to explain it. Sam Smith - To view our times …

More liberal gawk talk

Sam Smith - As noted here before, liberals have a tendency to use language that separates them from the very people they should be trying to reach. Two current examples are "defunding police" and "critical race theory." You can make an intellectual argument for both, but if you're trying to get someone elected it's not …

Some tips for liberals

Sam Smith - Over the past two decades there has been a significant decline in Democratic support from non-college grads. One factor in this has been an increasingly well educated liberal constituency with a decreasing skill at reaching those less educated. In fact, if you go back to the New Deal or Great Society, liberals …

Covering the Cambridge city council in the 1950s

Your editor's coverage of the Cambridge city council for the Harvard student radio station in the 1950s as one of the reasons he has never regarded politicians as role models. Here are some details of this experience. Sam Smith - On a May morning, the Harvard Crimson came out with a story that Cambridge city …

When God turned right

Sam Smith, 1998 - Sometime between the 1960s and the 1980s God became a conservative. This is not tosay that God wanted to become a conservative, only that the great perception processor in the sky that has assumed so many of the Lord's functions in recent years declared it so. If one wants proof that …

Multiculturalism means living with folks who aren’t as smart about you as you are

Sam Smith - As the virtuous drive towards more multiculturalism grows increasingly powerful,a predictable but largely ignored problem raises its head, namely the more contact we have with those of other cultures the greater chance that we, or they, will say or do something found dumb or offensive.  The cancel culture is one example of …

Positive ethnic theory

Sam Smith - The big problem with critical race theory is that it's big on analysis and low on action. Under CRT, kids would be taught the evils of past systems with far less attention to those who changed it and how they did it. Change is driven far more by inspiration than by facts.  …