March, 2008

It wasn't that long ago that the Vatican and the White House saw the world pretty similarly. Throughout the Cold War, both staunchly opposed communism, laying the bedrock for U.S.-Vatican cooperation. But that harmony is long gone. During his U.S. visit next month, Pope Benedict XVI will show how much his worldview differs from President Bush's when he denounces the continuing U.S. occupation of Iraq before the U.N. General Assembly -- a denunciation that's expected to be especially harsh after the recent martyrdom of a Chaldean Catholic archbishop killed by insurgents in Mosul.

From the Ivy League to the brainiac liberal arts colleges to the major public universities, God has been silenced — or so conventional wisdom tells us. The conventional wisdom, as it turns out, is not quite right. From the pollsters come recent data showing that religion and spirituality are alive and well at colleges and universities. A recent study by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA finds that more than half of college juniors say "integrating spirituality" into their lives is very important. Today's juniors also tend to pray (67%, according to the UCLA study) and 41% believe it's important, even essential, to "follow religious teachings" in everyday life.

When Barack Obama delivered his bracing speech on race, he was grappling with the challenge of merging self-interests for common-interests. “Realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams,” he said. “Investing in the health, welfare and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.” Globalization presents the United States with an enormous challenge. Rising to the test will require big investments in the public good — from infrastructure to education to a safety net protecting those most vulnerable to change. Americans must once again show their ability to transcend group interests for a common national cause.

Winter is coming to Antarctica, and that may be the only thing that keeps another of its major ice shelves from collapsing. On Tuesday, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey announced that there had been an enormous fracture on the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf, which started breaking last month. What matters isn’t just the scale of this breakout. Changes in wind patterns and water temperatures related to global warming have begun to erode the ice sheets of western Antarctica at a faster rate than previously detected, and the total collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf is now within the realm of possibility.

Historically, blacks and Hispanics have shared similar social and economic burdens. Each group has come to realize independently that unity and a common purpose bring political clout — and change. Will change become a common goal or a source of tension? Without change, blacks and Hispanics will continue to struggle to overcome their differences during the next presidential election and beyond.

One thing is certain about the March 29 elections in Zimbabwe. They won't be fair. Strongman Robert Mugabe is seeing to that. But what of the outcome? The possibility exists that it could trigger the end of his ruinous rule. The world was caught flat-footed at the violence that erupted after Kenya's disputed elections Dec. 27. The African Union should be ready to send negotiators to Zimbabwe to mediate a transition of power. The West should send clear signals of willingness to help – economically and politically – in a transition if Zimbabwe is ready to move toward reform. Mugabe will be out some day. The world should be ready.

Leave it to the Bush administration to throw thousands of law-abiding American workers and companies off a cliff in perilous economic times. That would be the effect of its decision to press ahead with a bad idea: to force businesses to fire employees whose names don’t match the Social Security database. The purge is part of a campaign — along with scattershot workplace raids and the partial border fence — to make a show of tackling the broken immigration system.

I almost died for someone else's crime. Had the jury listened to the prosecutor, I would have been sent to death row, and even might have been executed by now. Instead, I spent nearly 20 years in prison before new evidence proved my innocence and I was able to walk away a free man. We have an alternative. Sentencing people to die in prison of old age and illness punishes without pretending that we have a foolproof legal system. I'm a living example that we don't.

Medicaid, the health insurance program for poor people, is again under assault. Created in 1965, it has been instrumental in providing low-income Americans with needed medical care for more than four decades, serving as a crucial component of the nation’s safety net and sustaining some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens. Medicaid's cost is divided between the states and the federal government. The administration is now trying to shift more of the costs to the states, which are already struggling with a deeply weakened economy.

Over the past 25 years nonviolent peacekeepers have been going into zones of sometimes intense conflict with the aim of bringing a measure of peace, protection, and sanity to life there. Rather than use threat or force, unarmed peacekeepers deploy strategies of protective accompaniment, moral and/or witnessing "presence," monitoring election campaigns, creating neutral safe spaces, and in extreme cases putting themselves physically between hostile parties. Civilian unarmed peacekeeping has had dramatic, small-scale, quiet, and unglamorous successes: rescuing child soldiers, protecting the lives of key human rights workers and of whole villages, averting potentially explosive violence, and generally raising the level of security felt by citizens in many a tense community.

The usual dire annual warnings about Social Security and Medicare should not mask the true nature of the country's problems: a huge national debt that limits options and a health care system that cries out for reform. If all the surplus money for Social Security and Medicare had been saved, the trust funds would be good for 33 and 11 years respectively. But when the surpluses go away -- as soon as this year for Medicare's hospital program and nine years for Social Security -- the national budget could get a double whammy. Social Security and Medicare must both be repaid with interest, and there is no guarantee other spending will drop.

During the last two weeks, excerpts from sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., pastor for more than 35 years at Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side, have flooded the airwaves and dominated our discourse about the presidential campaign and race. Wright has been depicted as a racial extremist, or just a plain racist. The problems of race confronting us are immense. But if we sensationalize isolated words for political advantage, casting aside the depth of feeling, circumstances and context which inform them, those problems not only will remain immense, they will be insoluble.

This country's great failure - the unresolved war in Iraq - continues its deadly pace. A roadside bomb late Sunday killed four U.S. soldiers, bringing the conflict's five-year toll to 4,000. Barring a miracle, there is nothing to stop this total from hitting 4,500, 5,000 - or beyond. The White House curtly noted the latest milestone as "a sober moment," but there is no sign the president is changing his stubborn, fruitless direction. To him, and an ever-shrinking pack, this war is somehow winnable.

Imagine having only an average of $3 a day - or $1 per meal - to feed yourself. Food stamp recipients don't have to imagine it; that's roughly the daily benefit each person on the program receives. Congress can and should do better as it nears a final compromise agreement on the massive farm bill that's been in negotiations for months. Any desired increase won't end the need to deal with hunger in the nation, but it would certainly help.

When U.S. military deaths in Iraq hit a round number, as happened Sunday, there's usually a week of intense focus on the war -- its bogus rationale, its nebulous aims, its awful consequences for the families of the dead. Not likely this time, though. The nation is too busy worrying about more acute crises, some of them real - the housing market, the flagging economy - and some of them manufactured, such as the shocking revelation that race can still be a divisive issue in American society. So the fact that 4,000 men and women serving in the U.S. armed forces have been killed in Iraq is somehow less compelling than the zillionth snippet of a sermon that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright preached more than six years ago.

When Emilio Gonzalez steps down next month as director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, he will leave an agency as flawed as he found it. Citizenship application processing is mired in backlogs, disenfranchising legal residents who try to follow the rules and offering a new incentive for others to ignore them. The broader issue of how to reform our broken immigration system is complicated, and we may debate the fate of millions of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. for months and years to come. But there are aspects of the system that can be fixed right away, and the immigration service's backlog is one of them.

The genocide in the Sudan has become an unattended stepchild left to well-meaning groups and individuals who further sap the possibility of decisive action by directing attention to delicate measures of relief and equally fragile diplomacy. Blankets are necessary, but they will not stop the razing of villages. As Sudan brazenly defies, if not the world’s will, then, its wishes, and the death toll closes upon half a million, the pity is that the people of Darfur can in fact be saved. In concert with our allies or entirely alone, we have the military potential to accomplish this.

According to a freshly released report by the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law the congressional delegations of Texas, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona — all states with relatively high levels of poverty — generally received low marks when it came to voting for measures that could help poor people. These states, the study researchers found, suffered the highest rates of poverty.

Assertive mental health programs for the homeless increase opportunities for housing and improve their quality of life. Attending especially to the high-risk homeless - those with mental illness, substance abuse problems and certain chronic medical conditions - will likely decrease mortality rates. Respite care also has been shown to drastically cut hospital costs. And most important, of course, the homeless need housing. Yet homelessness still exists in epidemic proportions. Why? Because the homeless are often not hospitalized if they are uninsured; they are not being placed in psychiatric units because there are not enough beds available; and they are not being housed. Even worse, they are being demonized instead of being treated. What we really need is to provide compassionate, respectful, quality care to this very vulnerable group.

The United Nations tackled the task of troubleshooting climate change last month. Between holding General Assembly meetings at headquarters in New York, bringing 100 environmental ministers to Monaco in the largest meeting of ministers since Bali, and launching a Climate Neutral Network to highlight best practices in tackling global warming, the UN appears to be doing what it can to ensure that climate change does not fall off the political radar. Yet, it still isn't enough. A concerted international strategy, on a par with the seriousness and scope of a Security Council resolution, is what's needed to counter this climate crisis.

The best American medical care is indeed extremely good, but much of our system falls short - especially when you consider how costly it is, how heavy a burden it places on employers and families, and how many it excludes. And far from being a threat, getting the government more involved in health care would actually reduce costs, improve quality and bolster the U.S. economy - which helps explain why public insurance is the secret weapon in both of the leading Democratic candidates' plans. If socialized medicine means doing what our public-insurance programs and other nations' health systems do to control costs, expand coverage and improve the quality of care, it's high time for a little socialization.

Just four years ago conservative evangelicals and Catholics were credited with giving Bush his “political capital.” Now they seemed broke. Did the coalition splinter? Did it go dormant or simply dissolve? Is something new afoot? The results may mean nothing, said John Green, senior research fellow for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, other than that a coalition that bonds tightly on issues didn’t hold together on which candidate best represented their perspective. "In the primaries you’re not seeing issue-based politics as much as you are seeing candidate-based politics. In the end they split up their votes among several candidates.”

Jeremiah Wright has indeed made some outrageous statements. But he should be judged as well by his actions — including a vigorous effort to address poverty, ill health, injustice and AIDS in his ministry. Mr. Wright has been frightfully wrong on many topics, but he was right on poverty, civil rights and compassion for AIDS victims. What should draw much more scrutiny in this campaign than any pastor’s sermons is the candidates’ positions on education, health care and poverty — and their ability to put those policies in place. Cutting off health care benefits for low-income children strikes me as much more offensive than any inflammatory sermon.

When there are fewer crimes, cops get the credit, and when there are more, they are held accountable. It is a winning attitude -- but one based on a myth. The police have no more control over the economic and social forces that drive crime than doctors and nurses have over fluctuations in disease. No one holds the local hospital director responsible when rates of heart disease or diabetes increase. We understand that these conditions are influenced by lifestyle, nutrition, environment -- factors that transcend local boundaries. Crime is no different. So if Los Angeles is worried about this uptick in homicides, it should also brace itself for more crime to come. Why? In a word, the economy.

Five years into the Iraq war, much of America's focus has been on the nearly 4,000 U.S. soldiers who have died, the $600 billion in tax money spent, and the projected tab of $3 trillion. Those figures are a staggering reminder of how much the war has cost us in blood and treasure. But often lost in our debate and fading news coverage is the toll the U.S. invasion has taken on the Iraqi people.