Searching for Leadership

What happened today in Connecticut is unspeakably horrible and tragic. Inevitably, it also will become a political question, a matter that demands public debate and new policy initiatives.

These kinds of preventable slaughters have become too frequent -- even one of them would have been too many, and the U.S. is a country now desperately waiting for some leader to emerge with the courage and will to take this problem on.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a lone voice on the issue of gun control recently; where is another person of courage?

When a sports commentator added his voice to the conversation, he was widely ridiculed, which says more about the state of denial many sports fans live in than it does about him.

If you are a parent or grandparent or aunt or uncle or even a friend of children, or even if you are none of the above but have a heart, you know how horrifying today was for all of us, and you felt the horror yourself.

I'm not sure that gun control is the entire answer here, but I do know that restricting access to weapons that have no other purpose but to slaughter other humans is the right thing to do.

We also need much better mental health intervention services. We need better community awareness of the signals that someone is in trouble in the types of ways that could lead them to do what was so tragically done today.

Rarely is an individual so isolated that literally no one is aware of his struggles, emotionally and mentally.

Remember that even the Unibomber was eventually identified by his brother, thanks to media circulation of his mad writings.

As I said, gun control is only one piece of what needs to be done, but for that we need a political leader willing to take on the NRA.

For that, it is time to look to our President. I'm sure his emotion today was sincere, that he was acting more as father than as Commander in Chief, as he wiped away tears.

But as President at this moment he is also Father in Chief. Step up, Mr. President, and take on the gun lobby. Now is the right moment. We need you.

p.s. If you agree with these sentiments, please forward them or your own to the White House.

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The Last Time Like This For a Century

Today, as we rounded the hill atop Bernal Heights at 8 a.m., the kids in the carpool and I noticed it had started raining, even though we were bathed in sunlight. "There must be a rainbow," I said out loud, though the kids were, as usual, plugged into their headsets, listening to music, even as I listened to NPR on the car radio, so nobody heard me.

"Wow!" was the collective response, theirs and mine, and we cleared the ridge and a gorgeous full rainbow framed our entire view westward.

It turns out they were paying attention, if not to me, to the environment around us.

Later, I mumbled something about today being 12/12/12. Once again, I doubt anyone was listening, but the point I tried to make was that this is the last time such a numerical date will occur in this century, since there is no 13th month, at least on the Western calendar.

In 89 years, we will again start a twelve year period when we experience another 1/1/1 to 12/12/12 sequence, but that's a long time away.

Alas, nobody was listening.

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Our Immigrant Stories

My 16-year-old has to make a movie consisting of individual photos on the theme of immigration. I couldn't resist relocating some old photos posted to this blog a long time ago and forwarding them to him.

This is the ship my Scottish grandfather, Alexander Anderson, traveled to America on back in 1923.

Here is the manifest from that ship, with his name on it.

It a terrific class assignment for a high school student to research and express himself on the immigration issue. Dylan has plenty of perspective -- he knows about the Irish, the Chinese, the Jewish and the Latino immigrations.

He'll create a soundtrack for his movie. I suggested this song, which he didn't know:


Arlo, the son of the songwriter Woodie Guthrie sings it with Emmy Lou Harris.

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