When Little Rock's racial integration was a hot topic, I was an Arkansas teenager who was elected to go to church conference in Illinois. I was aghast to discover that people there assumed I was a racist and treated me with scorn. The same was true a decade later, when I arrived for graduate school in Massachusetts. Even though this was Brandeis, a Jewish university dedicated to tolerance, the underlying assumption was that because I was from the South, I was dubious. Read More
Doris writes a weekly column for LaGaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper, which has pages in English, Spanish, and Italian. Begun in 1922 for Tampa's immigrant community, it continues to thrive more than a century later. Her column is titled "In Context," as it aims to put contemporary issues in the context of the past.
Methuselah and More
November 22, 2021
Among the many books Hubby left on his shelves was a well-reviewed one published in 2015 called "SPOR." The reasons for that name (and the name of the author, too) are complicated, so I'm going to skip that. You can look it up yourself if you are so inclined. It is a history of ancient Rome that ends at the beginning of the Christian era, and it was very slow going at first. Indeed, I was at about page 300 of the 600-page tome before it picked up enough to stop being an insomnia cure. Nonetheless, I made a few notes that I want to share, things that I'd not known or really grasped before. Read More
Georgia on my Mind
November 15, 2021
I began this column at a Holiday Inn in Lake City. For the first time ever, I drove alone to Columbus, Georgia. It was for a memorial service for my older sister, and I hope it will be the last of four such recent family events. I've made this trip to Columbus, which is on the Alabama border, upwards of fifty times. My sister and her family lived there when Hubby and I moved to Tampa in 1972, and we always spent at least one annual holiday there – Easter, Thanksgiving, and especially New Years, as her birthday was December 31. Read More
Did You See?
November 8, 2021
I depend on a news site, Daily Kos Elections, for information that takes a long time to be picked up by the mainstream media – if it ever does. Perhaps by the time you read this, our lazy local paper's partner, the Miami Herald, will have looked around its own backyard and told you what Daily Kos has been telling me. As of Monday, the top two of many contenders in the recount for Florida Congressional District 20 were separated by five votes.
Jargon, Branding, Verbiage, and Other Substitutes For Thought
November 1, 2021
I was enjoying our lovely November weather, sitting on the deck with a cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie, when I opened the New York Times to this headline: "On the Left, a New Scramble over the Right Words to Say." The first paragraph featured a college freshman describing his Latino friends, and a female student interrupted with: "We say Latinx here because we respect trans people." Read More