2008Grace and Shea write a weekly column for Michigan Citizen.
"Living for Change" and "Thinking for Ourselves."
Grace 5-10-2008 Hyenas and Our Failing Schools
Several readers wrote to say how much they enjoyed last week’s column
in which I told the story of how Professor Kay E. Holekamp arrived at
her hypothesis that the relatively large size of the brains of
spotted hyenas may be due to their living in community, and also
suggested that the dumbing down of Americans in the last few decades
may be due not only to the media but to our loss of community and
solidarity. read more
Shea Looking for Truth
Many of the events of this past week have been lost under the weight of
the attacks in the press on Reverend Jeremiah Wright, labeled as a man
whose “incendiary statements threatened serious harm to former
parishioner Barack Obama. ” The news media focused on the brief
question and answer period that followed Wright’s speech on the history
and theology of the African American Church at the National Press Club. read more
Grace 5-10-2008 Hyenas: Sociable, and Smart
"I can’t get out of my mind an article on the social intelligence of
hyenas by Carl Zimmer that I read two months ago in the Science Times
section of the March 4 New York Times. Zimmer tells the story of what Michigan State University Professor
Kay E. Holekamp learned about brainpower from her studies of spotted
hyenas." read more
Shea Sand Storms
"It has been a little more than one month since Iraqi Prime Minister
Nuri al Maliki decided to launch an attack on Basra. In the course of
this month the U.S. has shifted into a largely unreported, intense
level of urban combat, devastating the poorest people in Iraq and
initiating a crisis of survival for the two million people who live in
the Sadr City section of Baghdad." read more
REBUILDING DETROIT: AN ALTERNATIVE TO CASINO GAMBLING
By James Boggs
Public Speakout, 1st Unitarian-Universalist Church
Friday, June 24, 1988
"Monday night I went to the graduation for one of my grandsons in Ford Auditorium at which Mayor Young was the main speaker. The student who introduced Young said, with a smile, that he was the only Mayor she had ever known. Young then said in the same joking vein that maybe some students should come back in ten years and run for Mayor because by then he would probably have retired. Everyone laughed, but it is no joking matter. The sad truth is that his honor has been Mayor for so long he thinks he owns the town and seems to have forgotten that the people elected him and may one day retire him before his vision of Detroit leads us into even deeper chaos." read more
Scott Kurashige The Future is Now: California's Multiracial Challenge to America
"Sixty years ago, Carey McWilliams, the well-traveled writer/activist and soon to
be editor of The Nation, described California as "our nation's racial frontier."
As the West Coast's multiracial makeup posed new problems and challenges, it
also offered America "one more chance, perhaps a last chance, to establish the
principle of racial equality." In this regard, it blessed California's residents
and observers with "a ringside seat in the great theatre of the future."
In stunning fashion, the California Democratic primary signaled that the future
has arrived with dramatic implications for the entire nation. There has never
been an important election like this where a candidate failed to win African
Americans and whites but won overall-as Clinton did in California." Read More
Now available
The Shifting Grounds of Race:
Black and Japanese Americans
in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles
by Scott Kurashige
Burning Times Dreaming The Dark - STARHAWK
" We still survive, in the culture of estrangement, for how much longer no one knows. Yet to change that culture intelligently, we must understand it, trace its roots, know its history - not because estrangement is the lineal descendent of one particular historical event or time, but because the past is still alive in the present."
Ron Scott: 12/15 Beyond Jena
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a physical place
