I sat and watched in disbelief as the numbers rolled across the bottom of the dayroom tv. It was a late night in November 2016, and the guard on duty that night let me stay up late to watch the presidential race results. The other inmates in my dorm slept so soundly around me as if it was just another day in prison. Donald Trump’s numbers rose as my spirits fell, and then all too quickly, it was over. We had a new president and four years of uncertainty ahead of us. The next

In 1858, two years before becoming President, Abraham Lincoln lost the race to become the Senator from Illinois. Still, in accepting his party’s nomination as their candidate, Lincoln spoke words that continue to resonate for us today: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Here, Lincoln was speaking about a nation on the verge of being rent asunder. Then, as now, there was a notion that our nation is a compendium of ideals, of values, of historical narrative. Th

In 1965 in Des Moines, Iowa, students at a local school sported armbands to protest the Vietnam War. The immediate response by the school district was to ban the armbands leading to the Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, in which the ruling expressed that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Although the Court upheld that students are protected under the first amendment

This summer, with support from an Arts Respond project grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts, the Galveston Arts Center developed a special workshop series for a deserving group of creative teens. The participants were five students in the youth art collective at Galveston Urban Ministries (G.U.M.) whose mission is to develop holistic relationships to transform Galveston’s North Broadway community. The end-product of this eight-week virtual/in-person course was to be a

2020 has been exhausting, hasn’t it? Protests and pandemics; Murder hornets and threats of war. Hell, we’re barely into hurricane season, and every time I see a breaking news alert on TV now I sigh and think to myself, “WTF now?” Certainly, it’s been incredible to see how these calls to act against injustice have mobilized the nation. But it’s upsetting and draining and I can’t even watch the news anymore. There’s that undeniable frustration when it feels like marching for a

It’s been a while since the president has come to town. Sure, George W. Bush surveyed the damage inflicted by Hurricane Ike in 2008, buzzing around the island in Marine One to get a first-hand look at the destruction left in the wake of the category 4 storm. But for the last time a sitting president actually, set foot on the island, we have to go all the way back to the 1930s. And even then it was a brief, fifty-minute-long visit before speeding away to our neighbor to the no

What’s going on? Do you understand the times? When can we go back to normalcy? Some say that will never happen. Should we be afraid? We are experiencing a breakdown in national and inter-personal civility. We are witnessing social unrest sweeping the country. We are shut down due to a worldwide pandemic, causing illness and death like we haven’t seen in over a century and causing our economy to falter with massive unemployment and business failures not seen since the Great D