Author: Nancy Werking Poling
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Is it left or right?
I’m confused. I no longer know left from right. Vladimir Putin was a member of the KGB of the Soviet Union, a communist confederation. Communists are considered to be on the Far Left of the political spectrum. But there is no longer a Soviet Union, hence no longer a communist state. Property that once belonged…
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Of What Value is a Book?
A few weeks after I arrived to spend a year with a German family in Berlin, I celebrated my sixteenth birthday. They gave me two books: The Diary of Anne Frank and Cry, the Beloved Country. These two books informed my life as no other books have. Until then I had no knowledge of the Holocaust, no idea that…
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In praise of librarians
Are parents who threaten librarians over particular books also carefully monitoring what their children watch on computers and television screens?
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When commitment becomes extreme
Mary Surratt and John Wilkes Booth believed they had a moral obligation to kill the president. Today 39% of Republicans believe violent action is sometimes called for.
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Meanwhile, Across the Atlantic
On the morning of September 12, 2001, my husband, Jim, and I walked along the narrow brick street of a small Italian hilltown. At an outdoor newspaper stand a front-page photograph caught our attention: billows of smoke over New York. Likely an image related to a new movie. Yet we stopped. Relying on the little…
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Sesame Street got it wrong
The results of the 2020 census are in. We know approximately how many Americans identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, White, Other. Interesting, but relevant? I sometimes wonder if we’re wired to differentiate. Over here are plants. Some can heal your wound, some are tasty, and some are pretty to gather. Over here are animals. Some…
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Dear Senator Cruz
(My friend, Cannan Hyde, wrote a letter to Senator Cruz about being “a good dad.” Do the pandemic and natural disasters offer unique opportunities for parenting? I thought the letter is worth sending to a wider audience.) Dear Senator Cruz, Here are some ideas for how to “be a good dad” in the middle of…
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Repeating our History
Election Day, 1920, Orange County, FL, the county where I grew up. Black groups had been conducting voter registration drives. When Mose Norman, a Black man, tried to vote, a white mob went after him. In the next two days homes of nearly all of Ocoee’s Black families were destroyed by fire. Some estimates are…
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RBG, Donald Trump. and me
You’ll be excused for thinking that Donald Trump, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and I had little in common. But last week’s news of RBG’s death and Trump’s announcement that he’ll form a 1776 Commission tasked with promoting patriotic education left me thinking about how all three of us grew up studying the same version of American…
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John Lewis, library cards, and my confession
John Lewis, library cards, and my confession As I mourn with the country over the death of John Lewis and my thanksgiving for his life, my thoughts keep returning to…to library cards. In Walking With the Wind and in numerous interviews, Lewis told of being denied a library card when he was sixteen because the library was…
Nancy Werking Poling 