Category Archives: Authors

Authors A-H, Politics, Social Issues, Trends 2021

Bystanders and the Sergeant Schultz Syndrome – by Terry Howard

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Why, in many instances of social unrest, do we look the other way; that we do nothing? But before we offer some possible answers, last week’s rampage in Washington gives us some context, a starting point.

Like millions, I watched in disbelief thousands of “protesters” (or whatever you choose to call them) converge on the Capital building. The images of them scaling walls, overwhelming police and breaking windows while lawmakers cowered in hiding or were rushed out for their safety will be etched into my memory forever.

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Authors A-H, Social Issues, Trends 2021

Feeling Like An Outsider? – by Martin Kimeldorf

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OutsiderChatting off-topic one day with one of my favorite editors, Deborah Levine,  I talked  about feeling like an outsider at age 7 in my own family. Perhaps she had not discussed her similar feelings before because she embraced the topic and told about similar feelings in her childhood. Deborah told her mom how she believed she belonged to gypsy parents who must have left her on the doorstep.  Then without surprise or forethought she asked her mom, “Would you please return me to where I really belong?” Her mom was amused by her hyperactive daughter with the quick mind and tongue.

I then shared with Deborah that I felt I’d been left behind by aliens as part of an intergalactic experiment by my far-away family. This was not as far fetched as you might think when I explain how my father was a scientist working for the government in Radiation Biology. He had security clearances, and this was to explain why he was gone a lot to places he could not speak about upon return. was often on the road to places he could not tell us about.  It was also the 1950s when the red-scare atmosphere filled the very air and our television programing the paranoia of the McCarthy era.

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Authors A-H, Social Issues, Trends 2021

The Future: Coming Trends – by Marc Brenman

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We don’t know yet what the future will bring. We never know what the future will bring. Analysts often say it’s a mistake to predict the future by extrapolating the trends of the past. The world is too complicated a place. With the current pandemic, it’s been “up jump the Devil.” But never in our lifetimes has a Devil occupied the White House. Will we forget an important lesson we should have learned—that Evil exists, and walks among us? I’ve said for years that many people believe in good, but deny that evil exists also. Yet there can be no good without evil.

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Authors A-H, Poetry 2020

S I N-T H E T´-I K by Jerry Buchanan

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Before dinosaurs stirred, marine plants and animal bodies fell, decomposed on sea bottoms. Under pressure and intense heat two miles down, organic sludge turned to crude that crewmen drill today from offshore oil platforms.

Laboratory scientists create synthetic threads from polymers. Tailors design smart suits, hanging slacks; a finger-touch snaps fabric snug. New outfits reform waists, shoulders, thighs; sculpt bodies to look powerful, create modern colorful personas.

Synthetic -man buys melons in plastic mesh; packages sweet corn in Saran; protects and cools kids at soccer in vibrant uniforms; outfits firemen for burning buildings; produces cutting-edge medical tools; makes travel lighter, fuel-efficient; sends rockets to Mars.

Advertisers spin recycling myths, dump waste into oceans, ignore ancient forces astir among brand-colored logos in the Mariana Trench nearly seven miles down: Bald Barbie heads, skateboard wheels, broken combs, medicine bottles, plastic straws.

Break it down! Break it down! But natural rhythms cannot digest it. Silvery minnows, stinky salmon eggs–mimicry entices birds and fishes, their bellies swollen with hunger. Nanoparticles cut with hazardous chemicals infiltrate humans through faucets, food, and air.

Vivid marketplace-signage shouts: “Come! Look, buy, consume!” Investors watch daily stock prices, ignore future consequences of a money-driven market. Synthetic’s children begrudge ancestors’ myopic viewpoints firing up the marketplace.

Dust storms stain southern sunsets, trigger off a new generation of rocket boosters aimed at planetary habitats. Spacemen, wedded to the red Martian surface, hope their desperate quests will prove to be élan, vital, and spark a friendly environmental niche.

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Image credit: Blue and Red Abstract (Steve Johnson on Unsplash) with superimposed plastic/fish composite (Ocean Plastics Lab)

About Deborah Levine, Authors A-H

Deborah Levine Receives ‘HerStory Award’

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DIVERSITY TRAILBLAZER DEBORAH LEVINE HONORED BY GLOBAL WOMEN’S PEACE NETWORK
FOR LIFETIME OF COUNTERING HATE

HerStory AwardCHATTANOOGA, TN – The American Diversity Report announced today that founder and editor-in-chief, Deborah Levine, has received the distinguished ‘HerStory Award’ from the Women’s Federation for World Peace USA (WFWP), with chapters nationwide in all 50 states and locations in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, South America and the Middle East.

Levine is a leading international expert and top management consultant on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the private and public sectors. Her unique neuroscience cognitive-based approach to advancing DEI helps employers and disparate communities harmonize, rather than homogenize.

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Authors A-H, Black-Jewish Dialogue

Tikkun Olam / Ubuntu: We are one – by Cindy Steede Almeida

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This is an invitation to the Jewish diaspora and the African diaspora to see and hear with their hearts, not their heads, and not even though the lens of religion or traumatic memory of the events that occurred over the past 500 years and beyond.

I have a desire to see us all whole again and embrace the undeniable and long hidden truth of our connectedness.  The ancient bloodline between us is speaking and revealing itself.  The Native Americans acknowledge this existence of “blood memory”.  Native American Storyteller and Journalist, Mary Annette Pember shares the Ojibwe people’s definition of the blood memory in her article published in the Daily Yonder, 16 July 2010. “The Ojibwe understand that blood memory is their ancestral (genetic) connection to their language, songs, spirituality, and teachings.  It is the good feeling they experience when they are near these things.” 

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Authors A-H, Make a Difference, Social Issues

Good Works and Repair of the World- by Marc Brenman

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A couple of mornings before Thanksgiving (or Indigenous Heritage Day, depending on how politically correct or “woke” you are) I got a call from a Native American friend who has run into a patch of bad luck. He initiated a conversation on the political situation in the United States, and how he was glad that he could go to sleep and not be afraid of waking up to more craziness by President Trump. My first thought was “It’s a new morning in America.” Only later did I remember that this was a slogan used by Ronald Reagan in his 1984 Presidential campaign.

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Authors A-H, Pandemic, Social Issues

Becoming a better (No Bullies) nation – by Terry Howard

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Organizations gripped in COVID-related fear, uncertainty and job insecurity these days are ones that are most vulnerable for empowering bullies who thrive and exploit those realities.

Keep that thought in mind as you read this recent email.
“Terry, those in our office love your articles and want to know if you have written – or could write – something on bullying; not the overt type, but the subtle kind we’re seeing that’s hard to put your finger on. Got anything?”

When I got that email, two things entered my mind. First, given the havoc COVID is wreaking today, why on earth should we worry about bullying of all things?

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Authors A-H, Race & Ethnicity, Social Issues

Diversity & Speech Part 16: Creating an Anti-Racism Vision Statement – by Carlos E. Cortés

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The May, 2020, Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd launched thousands of anti-racism proclamations.  Millions took part in that performative aftermath.  Include me among those millions.

Like many people, I wear multiple hats.  One is chairing the Mayor’s Multicultural Forum in Riverside, California.  My half-century hometown is a sizable (330,000-person) city, whose steady but not explosive growth has enabled it to maintain a community feeling.  My wife and I continually encounter people we know when we go to a restaurant or take our daily two-mile walks around a nearby lake loaded with noisy ducks, geese, and egrets.

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