In the weeks since Election Day, I have read, listened to and considered more conservative opinion and thought than in the entire eight years prior. I've held my tongue with conservatives when I normally would have pounced. I've even looked up the local GOP's schedule for lunch meetings.
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was once again arrested in Alabama, and sentenced to four days in the Birmingham Jail. As the hours passed, the white guards and wardens stood outside his cell, doing a little mocking, gawking and talking.
There have been too many funerals like this in our city. Mostly black folks in the pews. The body in the coffin too young. Prayers from the pastor about new life and resurrection, yet nothing but death out in the streets. And the cause of it all? Gang violence.
Want a more peaceful year? More calm and less chaos in 2017 than 2016?
Besides the wise men, grungy shepherds and laboring Mary and Joseph, animals, too, were at the stable that night in Bethlehem.
One night this fall, we were watching TV when my daughter heard a noise outside.
In 1950, Dr. Louis Miller, a heart surgeon from New York City who immigrated from Lithuania as a boy and became a lifelong vegetarian after working on the floor of a meatpacking factory, was sentenced to prison.
Some evenings, after getting home from his shift at the foundry, William Clark will sit on his porch in the cool air and smoke a cigarette or two. In the growing dusk, he'll look out across his quiet Brainerd neighborhood as neighbors rake leaves or kids ride bikes down streets with names like Peachbloom Drive and Sunset Avenue.
In these divided days, let us take three steps toward each other.
Many of you voted for Trump. For a proudly racist fringe, doing so was a joy. Yet others? You were disgusted by him. Repulsed.
