(Image: Michael Ramirez) Let’s talk about clubs. Not the kind full of drunk college kids on spring break in Miami; the kind you belong to. When I was a teenager, I was president of my school’s Spanish club. (Ya sé … nerd alert!) The obvious prerequisite was pretty simple: an active interest in Spanish. What…
When my siblings and I were younger we lived in a big old house with a big dark old school basement. One day as my dad was down there working, one of my younger brothers trotted down after him. He was pretty young; probably 4 or 5. As my dad worked, my brother casually tells…
“ Look-look-look-look-look, my first pay check! Look at the window, there’s my name! Hi, me!” Rachel continued: “God, isn’t this exciting? I earned this. I wiped tables for it, I steamed milk for it, and it was totally—(opens envelope)—not worth it. Who’s FICA? Why’s he getting all my money? I mean, what- Chandler, look at that!”…
Dear daughter of mine, You’re pretty amazing, did you know that? Not only are you smart, sassy and beautiful—but you’re kind of an ethnic Heinz 57. When I was growing up, we’d ask your great-grandfather what we “are,” and he’d rattle off the list: Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Dutch, German, French, Belgian, Jewish, and Cherokee…
Several years ago, we decided to bring my family with us to visit my husband’s relatives in Mexico—and I’ll never forget the look on their faces when they saw children and the elderly begging in the streets. It’s not that they’ve never seen poverty in our country. (In fact, on one bizarre occasion my dad…
I remember the very first time I got hate mail for something I wrote. I was 16 and had just landed a gig as a junior columnist at a local newspaper. I wrote about everything from school issues to exchange programs and cultural profiles—by and large it was pretty chill, uncontroversial stuff. I was so…
You might wonder why Mommy didn’t go and march for you. You might wonder why there are no Facebook pictures of us two out there together, like so many of your future counterparts’ mommies posted.
That’s why I’m writing you this letter.
Yes, by all means, let’s judge this president by his actions. But, Congressmen and women, that also means we get to judge you by yours.
“But he’s done; he’s leaving!” some might say, “Why dredge up old news?”
Well, for starters, because he’s not leaving. Unlike his predecessors who (usually) left the capital city and gracefully settled into the annals of history, he’s sticking around Washington D.C. (Yes, yes, I know he’s still got a kid in school.) Politically, he’s not going anywhere anytime soon. As the aforementioned Bill Whalen put it, his farewell speech “wasn’t so much ‘farewell’ as ‘to be continued’.”
Have you ever seen the movie “Inside Out”? It’s a pretty adorable look at the imagined inner workings of the human psyche. Each human has a set of emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear) operating inside a command center (the brain). There’s also a vast bank of memories, and a smaller set of “core”…
A Future Free 