The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope

  ©Wendell Griffen, 2023           Again, police officers have killed an unarmed civilian in the United States. Again, the slain unarmed civilian was a person of color. On January 7, 2023, Tyre Nichols, an unarmed civilian Black man, died in Memphis, Tennessee because police officers detained him, harassed him, terrorized him, cursed him, beat him, tried to electrocute him, poisoned him, kicked him, threw him to the ground like he was trash, and then propped him beside an unmarked police vehicle without providing any first aid or other assistance for more than twenty minutes. Tyre Nichols died because emergency medical technicians did not rush to aid him, but let him suffer. Tyre Nichols is dead because policing in the United States is deadly to people of color, all the time, anywhere, on purpose.             After video footage was publicized by Memphis officials of the brutal, cruel, deliberate, vicious, and unprovoked attack and beating Tyre Nichols suffered from members o

©Wendell Griffen, 2023 I seldom distribute my comments about the daily newsletter from historian Heather Cox Richardson to a group. Instead, I restrict my comments to a few individuals. But her newsletter on January 4, 2023, prompts me to share these thoughts to a wider audience. I agree with Dr. Richardson (who teaches American history at Boston College and has focused her scholarly interests on the Civil War era) that the current dysfunction of the Republican Party, is obvious as shown by the Party’s inability to even organize the House of Representatives after winning a slim majority of seats in the November 2022 general election. I also agree with her view that the dysfunction is not solely caused by 20 far-right Republican representatives who are followers of former President Donald Trump. However, those holdouts are defying Trump’s appeal that they support Republican Caucus Leader Kevin McCarthy for House Speaker. Richardson’s observation that the present plight of the Repu