Stephen Gottlieb

South Africa brought a case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.

Since World War II, Israel has relied on its firepower to stay alive.

I was rather disturbed by the news that St. Rose would close. I’ve admired many things St. Rose did, and a friend’s daughter lived with us while studying there. And it’s our neighborhood. Although we’ve lived in two different places, we’ve always been in walking distance from the college. Who will close and what will the neighborhood be like after St. Rose?

New York is going through another round of legislative districting. I fear the results because I hear little real understanding of what gerrymandering is and why it’s a problem.

To get Social Security through Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt thought about the language. He didn’t package it as a benefit for any class of people – it was for everyone. It wasn’t a benefit; it was insurance. And it didn’t require going to some welfare office; it went through the Post Office. Roosevelt understood that language matters. President Johnson’s War on Poverty was about poverty, and Appalachia, not race. But the Erie Canal, one of the most important projects in the history of America, got held up for forty years by what’s-in-it-for-me objections.

Listen and I’ll tell you a Christmas story. Let me tell you what Dickens was really trying to tell us. This is not a story the greedy Grinches want you to know. But it is an American story. And it is a story that rang throughout the world until greedy politicians tried to tell you it wasn’t good for you and me.

Bill Mckibben, distinguished climate activist and founder of 350.org and Third Act, wrote, in The Crucial Years, that the recently concluded UN international climate summit in Dubai, may have handed activists “a new tool,” because the agreement included one sentence calling for “‘transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.’"

Listening to the Roundtable a few days ago I heard Vera Eccarius-Kelly explain that dictatorship is much worse than people understand. She couldn’t be more right, but I don’t know how many got her point, so I want to repeat and reinforce it.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor just died. It seems poor form to criticize the departed. But she might as well have participated in Dred Scott v. Sanford, the worst decision the Supreme Court ever handed down and one of the triggers for the Civil War, because her vote was crucial to another decision just as bad. O’Connor, Rehnquist, Thomas, Scalia, and Kennedy all voted to substitute their presidential preferences for the election results in 2000. It has been standard and proper for courts to conduct recounts when elections are challenged and enough votes are at issue to change the result. The Florida Court was doing that. And they were doing it the right way – recounting the whole Florida vote by a single set of rules. But this group of so-called justices decided it was OK to take the election into their own hands lest Mr. Bush be embarrassed by the results – Scalia was quite explicit about it but there was no other real explanation.

Our daughter, who lives in Cincinnati, is recovering from an accident. So we, our son and his family, went there for Thanksgiving this year. We had Thanksgiving dinner at a wonderful old Cincinnati hotel. At an appropriate point I had us focus on what we’re thankful for and started by saying that I’m grateful for the intelligence to have proposed to Jeanette fifty-six years ago. It’s a biological truism that none of us would’ve been the same without Jeanette, but she’s has been a great blessing to us all.