Category: Better Relations

Children and Guns

Here are some statistics about children and guns

  • In a typical week in the US 25 children die from gunshot wounds
  • Between 2012 and 2014 1297 children under 18 died each year as a result of firearm injuries
  • In addition there were 5790 non-fatal injuries from gunshots
  • African American children are 10 times more likely to be killed by homicides than white children: 3.5 per 100,000
  • Suicide among white children is 4 times as high as it is for African American children
  • The rate of unintentional firearm deaths is twice as high for African American children than it is for white children
  • The District of Columbia and Louisiana had the highest firearm death, respectively 4.2 and 4.5 per 100,000
  • Child suicide by gun were highest in Montana, Idaho, Oklahoma, and Alaska
  • Most children who died of unintentional gun injury were shot by another child about the same age
  • Child gun homicide deaths have declined, but suicide have increased by 36% from 2007 to 2014
  • Gun suicide rates for that period increased 60%

War Babies and Bi-Racial Children

After the Viet Nam war there were countless children fathered by American GIs, children who belonged nowhere because they were only half Asians, children the US did not particularly want. That was not a new phenomenon.  It has happened in every war, and the racism that accompanies these occurrences is far from new. Still when I read a recent BBC Magazine article about the children of black WWII GIs in the UK, I was struck anew with compassion on the one hand as well as with anger on the other. There were 100,000 black GIs in the UK during WWII, obviously and inevitably inviting love affairs. US law however made it difficult for GIs to marry and for black GIs race complicated the issue even further.  Inter-racial marriages were illegal and miscegenation laws were on the Continue reading “War Babies and Bi-Racial Children”

Libyan Slave Market

Once in a while in all I read to prepare for these pieces, I find myself in disbelief, encountering how evil humans can be. This week it was a story in The Guardian newspaper about what they called Libyan slave markets. Migrants, usually from West Africa, with little or cash and often with no papers, manage to pay people smugglers to get across the desert to the coast. The rescued migrant interviewed for this story tells of a bus ride organized by the Continue reading “Libyan Slave Market”

Donations to Resistance Groups

Have you heard of The Resistance? Not the Resistance that arose during WWII, the one that came into existence after the election of Donald Trump. The groups that make it up have all received windfalls since then.  They are groups such as 350.org, a climate change group, Planned Parenthood, Indivisible, the group that first began by issuing a manual for progressives,  and of course the ACLU. The unexpected donations have created a problem. While welcomed, the new generosity has ushered the kind of questions and issues expected when one suddenly finds oneself flush with money and volunteers. What to do with this unexpected money and with all these people? The organizations involved  are required to made big adjustments, some more than others, in order  to perhaps meet the expectations of new donors, to  decide how to spend the funds, when and how to use new volunteers, how to keep people giving or volunteering, how to reorder priorities to accommodate new resources.  National organizations are better equipped than local or state ones, they may have better staffs and organization to handle the influx.

Charity Navigator, a watchdog group, calls this rage giving. But whether or not it was given out of passion for a cause, it nevertheless says something worth noting. People are willing to fight for what they believe is right. We saw it with the Tea Party, with the Occupy Wall Street movement, yet in this case, it seems to go further. It involves backing your beliefs and your values with time and money.  It’s the kind of giving, stance and action which create social change and which says something about human nature. There are many who of course see this in political terms, but the real value of this phenomenon goes beyond politics.