I suffer from what is commonly called mental illness. Several years ago I was diagnosed with depression and have been taking medications since then. This is hardly surprising seeing as how some 16 million Americans experience “major depressive episodes” and that does not include all the Americans that have a more general depression, without, perhaps, […]
Is it better to seek tangible or intangible results? When the now outgoing president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, pushed for a peace accord with leftist rebels known generally as FARC, it was with the goal of securing an end to a half-century of horrible civil war, terrorism and suffering. Amnesty, social reintegration and political representation […]
In the wake of every mass shooting in this country the forces of gun control and gun proliferation meet on the battlefields of social media and cable news networks to lob rhetorical missiles at each other. One perennial argument offered by those in the latter category is what I have termed the “evil will prevail” […]
Once again the United States has to clean up the blood and broken glass after another mass shooting. Right on cue, the powers that be began lowering flags and calling the murders “an act of pure evil“. Such has become the predictable response from most members of government in the shadow of these disasters and, […]
Is there a war against conservative free speech in this country? If we are to believe the tirades coming from such right-wing organs as The Daily Caller, there is no doubt that a war is raging between the Quixotic champions of the First Amendment (the vilified, threatened and intimidated voices of the political right) and the […]
What we in North Carolina have witnessed over the past few days is, in many ways, a nearly perfect demonstration of how we would like our governments to work: neither side emerged fully satisfied, but both sides could still claim some degree of victory. The most despised element of the original S.L. 2016-3, the requirement […]
As states across the country continue to undermine the voting rights of their citizens, let us look briefly at one of the simplest, yet most effective barriers to the exercise of voting rights. In an effort to halt the great specter of “voter fraud” state governments have established regulations that force voters to present ID […]
Passive genocide, I think, is an appropriate phrase to describe the misguided, nonsensical and unconscionable actions recently taken by Donald Trump and his cadre of toadies in the Executive Mansion. Rather than directly targeting, bombing and massacring a certain group of people (i.e. Muslim refugees from the list of 7 countries), the syndicate in the […]
It has been long established that flag burning is an activity protected under the First Amendment. The burning of this symbol strikes many as unpatriotic, seditious, insulting and decidedly illegitimate protest. The beauty of the First Amendment, however, lies in its ability to elevate controversial forms of protest and defend them against silencing. It reinforces […]
13 January 2017 – Burlington, NC How many good ‘ol boys does it take to hook up a trailer to a rental truck? The answer, at least at the moment, is four. Our journey west began before breakfast as we loaded boxes and furniture into the rented truck, our covered wagon to the Lone Star […]
Antidote Notes 