News & Politics, Wisdom Warehouse |
August 18, 2015
‘Scenema’ and the Truth According To Darren Wilson
Driven by their own quest to better understand the emotions, conflict and complexities that emerged from the tragedy of Michael Brown’s death, filmmakers Sol Guy and Ezra Miller have just premiered a provocative experimental work – a standalone “scene,” extruded from the larger drama of Ferguson, Mo. The four-and-a-half minute piece is called “The Truth According to Darren Wilson,” and it has inaugurated a new feature, The Scene, on Tribeca Film’s website*. The site describes The Scene as a platform as a place “for actors, writers, and directors to create, collaborate, and......
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On The Wisdom Daily this week (May 4 – May 8), we discussed the enduring outrage and inequality so evident in Baltimore, the refreshing candor of a reformed racist, the illusion of words being “harmless” because we want them to be, the brave gender transition of a famous American icon and the “Deflate-gate” scandal in the NFL. Did you grow wiser this week? We hope The Wisdom Daily played a part. Words of Hope and Action, Inspired by Baltimore – and Amy Grant – Brad Hirschfield Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, has......
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To paraphrase Baltimore native H.L. Mencken: “For every complex question there is a simple answer. And it’s wrong.” It’s entirely human to want to understand something like the rioting in Baltimore by reducing it down to a single point, or at least a small but closely related universe of points. We should resist that temptation, because Mencken was right: We’d be wrong. A conservative commentator: “I hate to say it, but this is the outcome of creating a class of citizens who become increasingly dependent on the government for their well-being. The......
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There was a powerful confluence for me while studying last week’s assigned Torah portion alongside news coverage about the April 19 death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. In Baltimore, Gray locked eyes with police and ran; when he was apprehended, officers radioed for a vehicle for transport. By the time the police van pulled into the precinct station, Gray had three broken vertebrae and a fractured voice box. He died of spinal injuries a few days later. Demonstrations drew thousands of peaceful protesters. But in the aftermath of Gray’s funeral, Baltimore burned (a......
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Grief & Coping, Wisdom Warehouse |
April 30, 2015
From Standing By to Understanding: Black Lives Matter
I have been in and out of sleep all night. I wake automatically reaching for the remote to see if it has gotten any worse. I hold my blanket up so that only my eyes can see, pretending somehow that if I cover enough of myself, only parts of the news will infiltrate my soul. It’s too late, though. All of me is infected. All of us are infected. Baseball, the telltale sign of hope springing eternal, played in a silent Camden Yards – fans locked out for fear of violence. Curfews......
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From Odyssey Networks’ Faith on the Record series: In a nationwide atmosphere of heightened racial tensions, particularly between police and African-American men, UVA undergrad Martese Johnson (majoring in Italian and media studies on a full scholarship) was recently arrested outside an Irish pub on suspicion of underage drinking. The shocking degree of force used during his arrest, which left Johnson in need of ten stitches, has led to renewed cries of racial prejudice in policing. I hope we all examine: “What really happened here? Cops lost it. Most cops don’t, but this......
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