Archive for Month: June 2022
Citizenship: The Three Imperatives
Dear Annie and Ezra, You are almost 11 years old now, and you are citizens of several communities: your synagogue, your school, your teams, your town, your state, your country, and the world. You have responsibilities to all of those communities. A citizen is someone who has rights and responsibilities in a defined group. Those rights are at risk when we don’t act responsibly. In your Jewish community, your responsibilities are to learn the Torah, Read More
Hope
“Hope of consciousness is strength; hope of feelings is slavery; hope of body is disease.” — Gurdjieff “This is a fearful, hopeless and even nihilistic time.” — Michelle Goldberg “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” — Nietzsche Whew!! Other than placing your hope in consciousness, those are some pretty bleak quotes! Is hope hopeless? That’s the question I want to take on in this post. Read More
The Corrections Component in the Justice with PEACE System
What if jails were able to reduce recidivism by 50% over a three-year period (based on rearrest)? Well, 50 years ago, that’s exactly what we did. How did that happen? We developed a comprehensive and integrated program aimed at multiple stakeholders, and implemented it systematically through five phases: readiness, awareness, acquisition, application, and follow-up. This post will address all five phases of the Corrections component of the Justice in PEACE system I overviewed in the Read More
Justice with PEACE
No justice; no peace!!! That has been the slogan of many protest movements going back as far as the 1986 killing of Michael Griffith, a Trinidadian immigrant assaulted by a mob of white youth in Howard Beach, NYC. Since then, it has been a rallying cry for each miscarriage of justice perpetrated on the disenfranchised. It implies, of course, that peaceful action is impossible without justice. I wholeheartedly agree. In this post, I’m proposing that Read More
Pretending Part II
“Everything hurts,Our hearts shadowed and strange,Minds made muddied and mute.We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.And yet none of it is new” —Amanda Gorman In February, 2021, I wrote a post on pretending. In the last year, there have been so many terrifying tragedies and “none of it is new.” We are still pretending no changes are needed. So, here is Part II. As is my custom, I have been reading lots of books trying to Read More