Author: John Pavlovitz

This should be easy. We have just endured the most corrupt, inept, and relentlessly predatory presidential administration in our history. We have witnessed a willfully and tragically mismanaged public health crisis and a coordinated insurrection designed to overturn an election and install a despot. We have watched an extremist minority commandeer the highest court in our nation and mount an unprecedented repeal of the rights of women, of environmental protections, of voting rights. The coming election should be the slam dunk of the century, but it isn’t. We should be easily coalescing around our collective values, but we aren’t....

On June 19th 1865, Federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to declare the emancipation of all Americans, of every slave being freed. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued two-and-a-half years earlier by President Lincoln, but as a result of the geographic fractures created by the war, many strongholds of institutionalized racism existed. Texas was the final area of this nation to surrender to this particular bend of the arc of the moral universe toward racial justice — and someone had to forcefully bring them the news they’d refused to come to terms with: the war was over. 59 years...

It is a real shame that school children are not guns. If school children were guns, Conservatives would treat them with kid gloves. They would be ever so careful with their words so as not to cause offense to those who love them. They would exercise the rarest of restraint to avoid angering them; couching their words in every moment, being the closest thing to decent they ever are. They would suddenly find compassion for them. If school children were guns, Republican politicians would passionately protect them. They would go to bat for them and plead for them and...