Lady Liberty's Welcome Mat

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"--Emma Lazarus (1849-1887), author/activist, from her poem, The New Colossus, used as an inscription at the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

Donald Trump should have the words from this poem hanging on a wall at the White House, in large, glowing letters, to remind him and members of his administration that America is, and has always been, a nation of immigrants.

Norman Mailer's Thoughts On State Violence

"[T]here are two kinds of violence: individual violence and the violence of the state. The violence of the state is not just wars, it's also concentration camps...There can be violence in total censorship. Anything that cuts off expectations from people, possibilities from people, anything that compresses people by external government force is the violence of the state....Individual violence is very often the natural answer of people to the collective violence of the state." --Norman Mailer, from Mailer: A Biography by Hilary Mills (Empire Books, 1982), Page 36.

Risking All For Freedom

As I stood at the corner of 125th Street and Broadway in Harlem, on my way to Fairway supermarket, a city bus turned the corner. On the side of the bus was an ad for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The ad included a very striking  work of art: a lone black man in a wooden rowboat surrounded by hungry sharks and threatening ocean waves. This painting was a very dramatic and memorable depiction of a man (Haitian, perhaps?) putting himself at great risk for the sake of freedom. (I would love to know the name of the artist and when the painting was created.)

At a time when immigrants (illegal and otherwise) are vehemently demonized, this portrait is a reminder of how precious and desirable freedom is.