America

  • SNAP and the Truth About Who Needs Help

    I keep seeing posts floating around about how people who collect SNAP benefits are lazy or do not want to work. Let’s deal with the facts. Right now about 42 million Americans receive assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. That is roughly one in eight people in this country. Of those households, nearly 60

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  • The America We Were Sold

    I wish I still believed in the United States of America we were sold when we were kids. You remember the one. The country built on the solid foundation of freedom. The place where all men were said to be created equal, and where anyone could achieve the American dream if they worked hard enough.

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  • Grace: Born from the Ashes

    There are moments when fiction stops being fiction. When the story you thought you were writing to escape the world suddenly becomes the mirror that refuses to turn away. Grace was born out of one of those moments. I first began the story in 1992, in the shadow of the Rodney King verdict. The country

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  • The Last Chorus

    The door to the bar opened and light flooded in. The sun was rising outside but we didn’t care. We sat at the bar, still half-dreaming from the night before. Roy was behind it, wiping glasses, humming along to the sound system. I can still see him smiling at something silly Anni had just said

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  • It Only Takes One

    The danger of what lies ahead feels familiar to anyone who remembers Kent State. On May 4, 1970, in Ohio, a group of college students gathered on the Kent State University campus to protest the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. They were young. They were angry. They were unarmed. The National Guard had

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  • If you believe in free speech and the First Amendment, then you also have to believe in the right of others to speak their minds, even when what they say clashes with your own beliefs. That is the hard truth at the center of democracy. Free speech was never meant to protect only the voices

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  • Examining the gap between the Constitution’s ideals and lived reality Many will tell you the United States is a great country. In some ways, they are not wrong. There is a difference between the ideals written on paper and the reality lived by its people. For some, especially those who are white, straight, and Christian,

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