We can all reach higher when we stand on each other shoulders instead of other toes. Being a Dr.🩺 means dedicating yourself to learning: #👩Mom 🚫Dm 🚜owner.
Happy Father's Day to all dads out there. May God bless you all for the love, care, and support you bring into the home. As we celebrate you today, may Heaven also celebrate you. Single dads and moms who play a fatherly role in the lives of their kids and those around them🥳❤️🙏
Dear @WhiteHouse, my name is Rodney Smith Jr., founder of Raising Men & Women Lawn Care Service in Huntsville, Alabama. Through our 50 Yard Challenge, over 6,000 kids across the country have signed up to mow free lawns for the elderly, disabled, veterans, active-duty military, first responders, and single parents. With America celebrating its 250th birthday this year and me also being born on July 4th, I wanted to humbly ask if a few kids from our program and myself could travel to Washington, D.C. to help mow the White House lawn for this historic celebration.
More than anything, I want these kids to see how a simple act of service something as ordinary as mowing a lawn for someone in need can lead to extraordinary places. What better lesson in community service than showing them that helping others can take them all the way to our nation’s capital? I’d also love to bring my American flag-themed mower in hopes that the President might sign it, so I can later auction it off and donate 100% of the proceeds to a nonprofit supporting veterans. It would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to highlight the importance of service, patriotism, and the impact young people can have when they choose to make a difference. 🇺🇸
This is Margaret Swan, a great-grandmother stabbed to death 20 TIMES in a random attack in the middle of the day on Atlanta’s public transit. Her murder was the second horrific attack on MARTA in a week.
I want ANSWERS from Atlanta. The number of assaults, robberies, and rapes on MARTA’s trains is MORE THAN THREE TIMES the national average.
MARTA has 15 DAYS from today to provide:
- Security spending
- Safety plans for riders and workers
- Detailed action strategy to prevent crime and fare evasion
Margaret’s family DESERVES ACCOUNTABILITY. No one should be forced to fear for their safety on public transit.
I was born in February 1947. When I was born:
17 states had "Jim Crow" laws authorizing legal segregation of hotels, restaurants, and other places of business, along with segregated schools, hospitals, transportation, pools, phone booths, cinemas, beaches, and even water fountains.
Jackie Robinson hadn't yet become the first black man to integrate major league baseball.
30 states had laws forbidding inter-racial marriages.
10 states had voter literacy tests.
6 states had poll taxes.
Black people were excluded from many skilled trades and government positions.
All branches of the military enforced racial segregation.
More than 100 lynchings of black men were still to come.
It was eight years before Rosa Parks was arrested for riding in the front of the bus.
Federal and local policies (redlining, restrictive covenants, FHA underwriting rules) and private practice kept neighborhoods segregated and limited Black homeownership.
I had graduated from high school before the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
So I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear some 25-year-old saying "This redistricting ruling is just like Jim Crow" … yeah, no. It's not. I lived through the real thing, and while racism still exists, it is NOTHING like the institutional, pervasive, common, unquestioned punitive racism of my youth.
To me, the change in the racial relationships in the US in my lifetime is nothing short of astounding … or at least it was until we elected Obama. I voted for him the first time, hoping that this would seal the deal and put racism in its grave.
Instead, he fomented and supported racism, pushing hatred between the races, advocating for DEI villainization, backing BLM and the "Hands Up Don't Shoot" hoax, and claiming that white people were the cause of all of the suffering of black people.
And astoundingly, he and his wife are still pushing that same line. The US has given them everything—fame, fortune, power … and they're using it to tell us just how hard their lives are.
Seriously?
Sorry. They live better than 99.999% of the planet. They have zero to complain about. I've seen real racism, up close and personal … and this ain't it.
So let us continue to work through this most contentious issue, but let us start from the fact that we have come immensely far, that we've been amazingly successful in getting rid of virtually all organized and institutional racism, and that unlike the ugly reality of my youth, racism is now ILLEGAL in the US.
I've worked all over the world—Africa, Asia, Europe, Central and South America, Australia, the Pacific islands, and I will tell you that of the 35 countries I've worked in or visited, the US is one of the least racist countries of all.
As I said, it doesn't mean there's no racism … but please, let's attack what's left from a position of previous huge success, not from a position of failure.
In the hopes of better times and better understandings between the races, I remain,
Yr. Obdt. Svt.,
w.