Page 16 - Ct Viewpoints News Today

The mentoring circle: Supportive relationships across generations A Whitehouse photo taken for former President Barack Obamas "My Brothers Keeper" mentoring program. January is Mentoring Month, January 17 International Mentoring Day — with the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday a day of service.  (January is also Human Trafficking Awareness Month, underscoring one risk of a lack of positive mentoring and other adult presences in a young person’s life.) Supportive, cross-generational relationsh...

Evidence not clear that Trump incited Capitol destruction ) should make us be able to come together around that and move on with a common understanding. Truth and objectivity should be what brings us together, not pushes us apart, but at least for the last four years such ideals have been willfully tossed aside in order to engage in the war of words. Obviously, Trump is the main offender, but he is but one politician (granted the “biggest” politician) and he does it more offensively and wit...

Securing our nuclear legacy: An open letter to President-elect Joe Biden Dear President-elect Biden, As you noted in a tweet shortly after protestors stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, “Today is a reminder, a painful one, that democracy is fragile.” Indeed it is. And so are nation-states. The fall of the Soviet Union is surely well-cemented in your memory. And history shows time and again that empires end, sometimes surprisingly quickly. There could come a point, in the far more immediate fu...

The revolution will proceed reclining: the Capitol mob, their past, and the future of democracy Looking at pictures of Richard “Bigo” Barnett in the U.S. Capitol last week, grinning, his foot resting on a staffer’s desk in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and his arms extended, I recognized a jarringly familiar if initially hard to place tableau. Barnett appeared to be acting, according to Saul Loeb, the Agence France Press photographer who snapped the picture, “just sort of like he o...

Last votes of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others Yehyun Kim :: ctmirror.org Vanessa McGee, far left, and her husband Sam McGee take a selfie with their children after voting last November at the Hartford Public Library. Finally, the election season is over. The historic elections we saw in this cycle were intriguing. The runoff elections for the U.S. Senate in Georgia put a cap on the campaign season. For many people this could be described as a COVID-19 election. I would argue that this w...

Why is Lamont silent about a killing by one of his state troopers? Cloe Poisson :: CTMirror.org Mariyann Soulemane, her brother Saeed Soulemane and their mother, Omo K. Mohammed (l-r) pose with a photograph of their brother and son, Mubarak Soulemane, who was shot and killed by a state trooper in West Haven in January after a suspected carjacking. On Jan. 15, 2020, State Trooper Brian North ended the life of Mubarak Soulemane by shooting him through a car window seven times. The car Soulemane w...

Monthly CT VIEWPOINTS -- opinions from around Connecticut To save democracy, recommit to principles of the rule of law and human rights at home The fascist riot at the U.S. Capitol is a fitting denouement of the Trump Presidency.  His incitement of thousands of white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, and others caught in the thrall of his cult of personality demonstrated once and for all that there is nothing he won’t do to cling to power – -an...

Not the first violence at the U.S. Capitol, but we must make it the last An unemployed painter named Richard Lawrence attempted to assassinate President Andrew Jackson in January 1835. The U.S. Capitol was overrun January 6  by an angry, armed mob of insurrectionists carrying campaign banners with the name “Trump” displayed just as prominently as on any of his failed casinos. There is no doubt as to their motives;  they wanted to disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes by the Con...

The cancer of the body politic Protestors stand outside the state capitol. When people are given a cancer diagnosis, they naturally take an inventory of their past behaviors, looking for the roots of the illness. Was it all those cigarettes I smoked in high school? The diet soda I love? High tension wires? State Rep. Christine Palm But what about the cancer eating at the marrow of our country right now? Some of us are sitting in shock and asking, “How could this ever have happened?” Othe...

The COVID vaccine: Keep it simple, stupid The writer gets his inoculation. Not to judge, but why are smart people often so dumb? Last Wednesday I got my first COVID-19 shot. Yay! To schedule an appointment I had to go onto the CDC’s Vaccine Administration Monitoring System (VAMS). Here’s a link to their site so you can verify for yourself that what follows is not Trumpian BS (Please wait until after you’ve read this essay to clink the link. It’s a black hole and you might never return.)...