“There are no good options,” Brian Williams said the other night on MSNBC, launching a discussion about North Korea with the implication that war — maybe nuclear war — is the only solution to the problem it represents.

We’ve been cradling our own suicide for seven decades. The baby’s eyes open . . .

For those of us committed to systematically reducing and, one day,
ending human violence, it is vital to understand what is causing and
driving it so that effective strategies can be developed for dealing
with violence in its myriad contexts. For an understanding of the
fundamental cause of violence, see 'Why Violence?'
http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence

However, while we can tackle violence at its source by each of us making
and implementing 'My Promise to Children',

Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, is being blackballed — itself a revealing phrase — from the National Football League with the collusion of the all-white owners. He is ostracized because a year ago he exercised his First Amendment right to free speech by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem.

Kaepernick isn’t hooked on drugs. He isn’t a felon. He hasn’t brutalized women. He is treated as a pariah because he protested the continued oppression “of black people and people of color.” He wanted, he said, to make people “realize what’s going on in this country. … There are a lot of things going on that are unjust, people aren’t being held accountable for, and that’s something that needs to change.” Born in Milwaukee, Wis., one of the most racially segregated cities in America, Kaepernick is particularly concerned about police brutality and the shocking police shootings of unarmed African Americans.

The historians are coming.

Across the country, untold millions have suddenly awakened to the historical significance of various and sundry statues honoring the great Confederate generals of the Civil War. While their energy is no doubt commendable, their newfound knowledge has not yet permitted them to draw a distinction between education and glorification.

Our newly minted annalists, while wrong-headed, are not necessarily wrong. Although these triumphant monuments are somewhat misleading about the war’s outcome, they are quite informative about the Jim Crow era in which they were built. They also provide renewed motivation for debunking the “lost cause” historical narrative that has convinced generations of schoolchildren that the Civil War was fought by noble southerners over some obscure federalism issue.

Why does it seem, ever since the Charlottesville incident, that so many racist roads lead to Ohio? James Alex Fields, Jr. of Maumee, Ohio, ran his car into the counter-protestors, killing Heather Heyer and injuring several others. The “Huffington Post” of the white supremacist movement, The Daily Stormer website, is the creation of Worthington’s own Linworth High School graduate Andrew Anglin. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are 27 white supremacist groups in Ohio.

It may not be just the overt racist groups we should consider – sometimes the haters could be civil servants, like firemen from northeastern Ohio, as the following story reveals.

Shawnee Township Fire Chief Todd Truesdale’s 45th birthday inspired his fellow firefighters to throw him a party with a Nazi-themed birthday cake – decorating the cake are the words “German Fire Dept” encircling a swatiska, on the left-hand corner sits a tall replica of an oven also with a swastika on the side, and cake decorating frosting depicts presumably Jewish people marching toward the oven.