What Happened to Mental Health Care for Vets?
February 22, 2008 American Prospect
A disturbing look at the state of America’s war veterans who carry home with them the terrible psychological wounds inflicted by the U.S´s global conflicts. Read about the debate that is taking place in Washington as to what should be done to help heal the veterans of the wars if Iraq and Afghanistan who are killing themselves at an alarming rate.
February 19, 2008 The Nation
In a review of historian James Fraser´s book A History of Hope: When Americans Have Dared to Dream of a Better Future, politics professor Peter Dreier writes about Barack Obama´s ability to unite groups of diverse Americans around a common vision for positive change and situates this politics of hope within a larger history of politicians who have inspired ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things by mobilizing movements for change such as the abolition of slavery, the suffragist movement and the civil rights movement, among others. Read the review.
See What the Young Are Saying…and Be Moved!
February 20, 2008 CommonDreams
A college professor finds the responses of her students to the class’s discussions about contemporary global conflict so uplifting, encouraging, and even practical, that she has posted them on the web. Read excerpts from their journals.
February 21, 2008 CommonDreams
Margaret Krome, a member of a Florida agricultural family discusses agriculture’s conflicted history regarding migrant workers in the U.S– a history of dependence on migrant labor that has been marred by the nation’s oppressive immigration laws which she argues have created deplorable living and working circumstances for migrant workers. Recognizing that the U.S needs immigrants just as much as immigrants need employment, the author calls for changes to existing immigration policy so that we may see the end of the agricultural industry´s use of the legal system to abuse rural migrant groups. Read more here.
February 21, 2008 CommonDreams
An American woman writes about the deep impressions left by her visit to Cuba and the need for the United States to establish an “open-armed policy” with its poverty-stricken neighbor instead of an “armed and dangerous” attitude.
Family confronts the North’s slave-trading past
January 31, 2008 The Christian Science Monitor
A new documentary film titled “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North”, traces a family´s journey as it learns about and eventually comes to terms with its history as descendents of the DeWolfs family, a wealthy dynasty that became the largest slave-trading family in early America. Premiered at Sundance and to be aired on PBS´s Point of View the documentary highlights the way in which the history of slavery is one that continues to scar the nation´s psyche. The film posits that until an honest and open dialogue is established between America´s “two parallel societies”, as one of the film´s subjects puts it, the nation´s wounds inflicted by the history of slavery will fail to heal. Read about the documentary and the family´s support of a congressional bill, HR 40, that would create a commission to study slavery’s legacy and remedies.
