April 19th, 2021
By Ed Raymond
18 April 2021
What Are Our National Goals?
I imagine that every person who has lived as long as I have feels that they have lived in transformational times that may change the world. At 89, I get up each morning eager to get to the TV and computer to see what has happened in the 24-hour news cycle.
Sometimes I like what I see, sometimes I curse. Yesterday, in an article about aging, I saw that the odds I will not reach 90 is one in six. So today I hope I…
April 12th, 2021
By Ed Raymond
Sam Harris: “At Some Point It’s Going to Be Too Embarrassing to Believe in God”
After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Jerry Falwell, Sr., the leader of the Christian Right “Moral Majority,” blamed the attack on “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who tried to secularize America.”
Such an attack aroused the interest of atheist intellectual Sam Harris, perhaps the leading critic of religions in the DSA,…
April 4th, 2021
By Ed Raymond
Why Can’t Whites Jump?
In 1946 I graduated from Morrison County District #54 with two others, a German boy and a Polish girl. I’m French. I graduated from Little Falls High School in 1950 with 241 other lily-Whites. Oh, it’s possible that some might have had a drop of Black or Hispanic blood or two in their genome. The ethnics were more interesting. There were three Roman Catholic churches in town. The German and French were on the east side of…
March 28th, 2021
The only cure for our firearm pandemic is to reduce our number of firearms to the rate held by the 37 most developed countries, limit their power and capacity, and track all ammunition.
By Ed Raymond
Why American Kids Need More School Active-Shooter Drills Than Fire Drills
The Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area has a population of about 250,000. The Divided States of America has 330 million. The best estimate of the number of usable firearms in the country is 425…
March 21st, 2021
By Ed Raymond
fargogadfly@gmail.com
21 January 2021
What Job Pays 90 Bucks an Hour and You Just Have to Keep Repeating “NO”?
There evidently is a great deal of truth in the old adage: “Those who don’t know history are bound to repeat it.” The Divided States of America are beginning to look more like the Roman Empire and the Vatican each day. The power of Rome grew and died over a thousand years because only sometimes it acted like a real empire.
Modern life is quicker and…
March 15th, 2021
By Ed Raymond
fargogadfly@gmail.com
The Only Way to Defeat Trumpistan Is to Pass the Democratic Party’s Platform
Since 2013, when Chief Justice John Roberts declared the election of Barack Obama had proven that racial discrimination no longer existed in the United States, the Republicans have closed 1,688 polling places.
Texas alone has closed 750 while Arizona and Georgia have closed hundreds in counties where there are lots of colored people. In Texas counties that had gained the most…
March 8th, 2021
By Ed Raymond
fargogadfly@gmail.com
08 March 2021
Dennis: “Why Did Jesus Turn Water Into Wine When He Could Have Changed It Into Chocolate Milk?”
As I listened to our resident Mara-Loco psychopath Donald Trump address his cult at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) emphasizing his “America First” white supremacist program and ranting about immigrants, I thought of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem about America and his second stanza written about a half-century ago:
…
March 1st, 2021
By Ed Raymond
28 February 2021
How Can We Reform Victims of Trumpism, QAnon, and the New Ku Klux Klan?
In a Hialeah, Florida grocery store, a Hispanic man asked a white woman standing behind him, in both Spanish and English, to move six feet from him as they stood waiting to check out. She ignored him and “mumbled bad words” at him.
Out in the parking lot, as he was putting groceries in his car, she came within one foot of his face, yelled: “This is not going to…
February 23rd, 2021
By Ed Raymond
21 February 2021
Have We Eliminated ‘The Giants Of Racism, Extreme Materialism, And Militarism’?
In 1915 President Woodrow Wilson saw the first American motion picture ever shown in the White House, “The Birth of a Nation,” based on the book “The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon. Jr.It was a three-hour movie, part fiction and part history, covering the lives of the Northern pro-union Stonemans and the Southern pro-Confederacy Camerons.
I first saw…
February 15th, 2021
By Ed Raymond
February 18, 2021
Maybe the Prophet Down on Interstate 94 Was Wrong
As a student of American literature, I have read some of Sinclair Lewis’s many books: Main Street, Babbit, Arrowsmith,Elmer Gantry, and It Can’t Happen Here come to mind. Born in Sauk Centre in 1885, Lewis was evidently a troublesome Minnesota teenager because he tried to run away from home at age 13 to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War (Philippines, Cuba, Guantanamo…
By Josette Ciceronunapologeticallyanxiousme@gmail.com What does it mean to truly live in a community —or should I say, among community? It’s a question I have been wrestling with since I moved to Fargo-Moorhead in February 2022.…