What is the American Dream? The most common definition we hear is the economists’—a wife, two kids, a home of your own and a car in the drive. That definition may serve its economic purpose, but it isn’t, to me, the […]
Author Archive | Judy
Changing Racial Attitudes
I ended the last blog by saying that the current race movement is carrying the country toward extremism and further and further from changing racial attitudes. Radical positions like condemning whole civilizations may sound noble, but it accomplishes nothing—except ridicule, perhaps. Consciousness-raising, making America aware that it has a race problem, has been going […]
Racism and Fear
But allow the power of the internet to fall into the hands of those who deliberately heat fear into hatred, prejudice into racism, and we’ll move further and further from the kind of attitude change we seek.
An Ode to Diversity: Hema Vasavada
Hema Vasavada, one of the founding members of the Skagit Valley Writers League, passed away this week. A long-time friend and an active supporter of local writers, I will miss her. As I ponder how to honor her memory, I realize she is a model, for me, of what it is to be an […]
How to Start a New Year
I don’t know how to start this new year that feels already old. The usual resolutions seem irrelevant, the questions bewildering, the answers out of reach. I don’t know how to fix the mess the country has gotten itself into, a mess that is heading toward another crisis on Election Day. I can only […]
A Better Way to Talk Race
As I continued my browsing through old blogs, I also found this 2014 blog. It’s also worth reprinting (with some revision) if our goal is understanding; it gives a far better way to talk about race: Race in America—in Fiction Earlier in this series of blogs I talked of the rewards of reading novels […]
Race in America: Stuck in a Rut
Browsing through old blogs, I found this seven-year-old blog (Dec 5, 2014) that seems to sum up my feelings today pretty well. Here, with some revisions, it is: I watch today’s protests and feel very old, very frustrated, and very discouraged. I watched the same explosions and protests in the 1950s, 1960s, and […]
The Role of Race
I’ve been hard on identity politics and its role in polarizing the nation, so I want to be clear. Race is a critical issue for the country, and one that needs to be addressed. I understood and supported Martin Luther King and the peaceful protests of the Sixties Civil Rights movement of the […]
Time Out to say Thank You
High time to take time out from spouting opinions and say thank you. Thank you to all who have read my blogs and read my books. Thank you to my daughter for her strength and caring. Thank you my writer friends, particularly my critique groups, past and present for the attention and care […]
Years of Impending Doom
I watched the Reagan years with an ever-increasing sense of impending doom. I say watched because I was an outsider to the economic and social changes, living in one of the separate worlds, bubbles–the slices George Packer describes. I was teaching at the University of California, Santa […]
The Janus Face of Freedom
George Packer sums it up: “… if I were to put it in a single sentence, I would say: Inequality undermined the common faith that Americans need to create a successful multi-everything democracy (p.38).
How Did We Come to This? II
Confrontation forces attention on neglected issues. It also polarizes. When people turn the language of opposition into the language of enemies, they have turned the language of democracy into the language of war and legitimized acts of war on the democracy. Too many of the protests for justice, legitimate and needed, have turned into revenge […]
