Fairness - The Commentary

T here’s something human beings possess that’s proven awfully important for progress in science and technology, and even for advancing human cultures. It’s the need to understand, to discover answers to the questions we ask, and to continue to ferret them out in the belief that if we can just understand, then our species will be able to conquer everything that confronts us. If it weren’t for that impulse - maybe an innate need - to understand, who knows where we’d be? It’s taken generations of people who’ve sought answers, after all, to get where we are today. Often that’s fueled by a basic desire to survive - to preserve our species by finding a new vaccine or cure for a deadly disease, for example. At times it’s led us to new and improved ideas that fuel more inclusive ways to understand societal concepts such as equality. At other times it’s made our war machines more deadly. But the results of those attempts to understand have also taken longer to gain wide acceptance because new u...

On January 15th we could remember what actually is the 91st birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but his celebrations this year are on the 18th. It’s one of those more convenient Monday holidays that make for three-day weekends. There’s so much about Dr. King and his work that we really could celebrate. But our nation seems to prefer to focus most of its attention on his words in his "I Have a Dream" speech delivered on August 28th in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial to the 1963 March on Washington. No doubt, those words are inspiring, passionate, prophetic, and hopeful. It's his most recited speech, while others are less familiar. Our culture has made it iconic, quite useful, and less threatening. By removing it from the context of King's total life and thought, we've woven it into a pattern that can actually conveniently inhibit real, structural change. In other words, we've popularized some lines and images so that King doesn't really threaten the...

Renowned theoretical physicist Albert Einstein in a 1929 magazine interview put it this way: “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." If such a brilliant thinker, whose name has become synonymous with being a genius, recognized the priority of imagination, what’s happened to us to stifle and devalue our imaginings? Why is it that we live in a world whose leaders most often try unsuccessfully to solve the same old problems with the same old unimaginative solutions that hadn’t worked before? Why is it that the dominant ideas in politics are the same old ones that assume the rich can only exist by being dependent upon and ensuring that a class of people stay poor? For how many millennia have religious leaders been preaching at the world to stop the same old sinning - and yet, here we are, rife with the same old sins, especially those so-called “Seven Deadly” one...