I met a few nice college kids when I infiltrated the Atlanta “Stop Cop City” training and protest last weekend.

I say nice because, one-on-one, several of them were nothing but personally polite.  We chatted about school, and their majors.  I used to teach freshman composition, until I realized I could earn more with my Ph.D. at a Taco Bell.  I have a fondness for youths feeling their way towards adulthood.  These kids were, as usual in such protest movements, the children of the elite, attending good Georgia public universities or very expensive private ones.  They had manners. It was easy to differentiate between the trained, well-paid, professional agitators and the local youth who were drawn to the training and “non-violent but violent” march because they were excited to be part of something “revolutionary.”  I say “nice kids” even though they were involved in an evil enterprise because they’re still malleable: some of them might be saved. ... 

I was very sad to hear the news about Paul Howard being involved in a financial scandal.  I was shocked.  I can’t say I knew him, but I knew his door was always open to crime victims for the twenty years I worked in victim advocacy and lobbying in Atlanta.

Nobody in politics has a perfect record, but more than a few times, I heard from victims of horrific crimes that Howard himself comforted them and sustained them through very difficult circumstances. ... 

Elinor Burkett

Elinor Burkett is one of the oddest, rarest, yet most overlooked species in the journalism zoo.  She is practically a holotype.  Burkett started out as a history professor, a good one too, I imagine, before switching to journalism and teaming up with the now-New York Times op-ed contributor Frank Bruni.  Together, they wrote a very quirky book about consumers’ rights called Consumer Terrorism and a very serious book about the Catholic Church scandal.  But as Bruni swung left, Burkett swung — well, it’s hard to describe.  She swung to an extreme commitment to open-mindedness which led her past ideology and conventional thinking to new insights into subjects such as the politicization of AIDS, the post-Columbine hysteria over American teens, a (relatively fair) revaluation of conservative women in politics, a biography of Golda Meir, and an utterly delightful book about her decision to travel, as an American, Jewish, woman, to the most dangerous places in the world for Americans, Jews, and women.  In So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in all the Wrong Places, Burkett visits Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, China, and Vietnam in the wake of 9/11.  She doesn’t do this, or much of anything else, to make friends, which is what makes her work so honest and refreshing. ...