As some people face losing their rights while other people look away, we will find ourselves at a crossroads. We will have to make decisions less by our political ideologies and more by our moral compasses. I remember when mass shootings started to become part of our everyday news cycle, when one of Trump’s first […]
I can tell her what’s happened, but I can’t tell her why, because I don’t understand why, and I don’t know how we can possibly fix it. Every parent has to have that conversation with their child at some point. My daughter is only 2, but she already has questions. The longer I put it […]
Republicans think an overhaul of the mental health system will stop mass killings. It won’t. This bill is pushing people toward mental health care that, in my experience, does nothing to improve their long-term outlook. In the wake of the recent Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado, House Speaker Paul Ryan called for a renewed commitment to […]
As a mother, I can only hope that my daughter survives the landscape of violence we have created for her to live in. This semester, I assigned Jo Ann Beard’s seminal essay “The Fourth State of Matter” in my freshman seminar course on first-person storytelling. With it, I also issued a brief content warning: The essay […]
Finally, the place where I live is making a public admission that I’m welcome here. The last few weeks have felt like a train moving through the night without interior or exterior lighting. I’m not sure if the destination has been fully revealed, but as I sat in my 4-year-old son’s room a couple of […]
