Bury medals of Wounded Knee?

December 3, 2019

The commendable “Remove the Stain Act” originated in the House of Representatives (H.R. 3467) on June 25, 2019, sponsored by, among others, Rep. Denny Heck, D-Wash. The bill’s purpose: “To rescind each Medal of Honor awarded for acts at Wounded Knee Creek on Dec. 29, 1890.” By 1890 the Plains Indians were desperate. Their land had been confiscated and the buffalo were gone. They were starving. In late December, a band of 350-375 Lakota Sioux, led by Spotted Elk, was making its way to the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota when they encountered a detachment of the 7th Cavalry. ...

Combat the evil done in our names

December 2, 2019

Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays. We know because Perry Como reminds us incessantly every year about this time. And because the airports become madhouses and the highways parking lots, so many of us trying to find their way back to that place where you are safe and known, that place where they’ll always take you in, home. Here in the season of festivity and light, it’s probably natural that we don’t think much about how it feels to be a child in a chain link cage, a woman sleeping on concrete, a man denied soap, toothpaste and medicine. In the season of home for ...

The Zen of the most American of nation’s holidays

November 27, 2019

Editor’s Note: This is a revised version of a column first published in November 2002. Thanksgiving is the most American of holidays. But there is something almost un-American about it. It is a day opposed to striving, to getting more. We stop adding up the numbers on the scorecard of life. We freeze in place and give thanks for whatever is there. The Wall Street Journal once featured sob stories about failed dot-com entrepreneurs. People still in their 20s and 30s spoke painfully of their disappointments. They had planned to make many millions on internet startups, but the ...

A lesson for all Americans from ‘The Crown’

November 26, 2019

There is a telling scene in Season 3 of the Netflix drama “The Crown” about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II that can instruct contemporary America about Democrats’ attempt to impeach President Trump. The episode is titled “Coup.” Harold Wilson is prime minister of Britain. He has just devalued the British pound and a bad economy has provoked street demonstrators to call for his removal from office. A cabal ensues, led by Cecil King, the editor of the otherwise pro-Labour Party newspaper, the Daily Mirror. The plotters select Lord Mountbatten as the one they wish to ...

Political courage is contagious

November 26, 2019

During his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Nov. 13, Ambassador William Taylor described our diplomatic relations with Ukraine in terms of two channels. The first emanates from the Department of State and is managed by diplomats and staffers under the oversight of the ambassador and secretary of state. The second, as described by Taylor, Russia expert Fiona Hill, Ambassador Gordon Sondland and other witnesses, was a “highly irregular” channel operated by an ad hoc team comprised of Ambassadors Sondland and Kurt Volker and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, all ...

‘This is America. …And here, right matters’

November 25, 2019

In her diary entry for July 15, 1944, Anne Frank wrote words that would harrow and challenge generations not yet born: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Less than a month later, “people” would discover Anne and seven other Jews hiding in a secret room. “People” would pack her in a crowded cattle car with only a barrel for a toilet and send her on a three-day journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The following February at Bergen-Belsen, “people” would watch her die of typhus. She was 15 years old. All of which makes her words ...