Category: Indiana Writers Group

For the use of the membership only (708 words) TOO MANY REPUBLICANS miss a fact central to the disturbance playing out in Ferguson: Quite a few people get shot and killed by police officers in America every year; not many of them, however, are unarmed. Suspicions rightly arise when an unarmed individual is killed by…

by Cecil Bohanon, Ph.D. The world just seems to be filled with stupid, lazy and greedy people. A Wall Street Journal article a few years back described a really dumb practice of a major American automobile company. Passenger vans produced in Turkey are imported into the United States. As soon as they clear U.S. customs,…

“Amid all of the daunting challenges facing Indianapolis, and despite the deep concern about growing poverty and increasing crime, the city now has an opportunity to help thousands of at-risk children and, along the way, set the stage for generations of repaid dividends.” — Matt Tulley, Indianapolis Star, Aug. 15 by Hang La Democrats in…

For the use of the membership only (534 words) INDIANA’S ONLY STATEWIDE newspaper has reinvented itself, we are told. You should hope it succeeds — for the sake of the hard-working, ink-stained souls there but also for the health of our public discussion. Yet, there are veteran newsmen still at their desks who have been “reinvented” dozens…

by Tom Charles Huston I cannot resist a certain admiration for the sheer audacity of the criminal enterprise that is the Obama administration. Its tentacles extend to so many branches, bureaus and cubbyholes of the Leviathan as to defy diagramming, and its unity of action without unity of command offers a new model for imperial…

by Andrea Neal James Whitcomb Riley was the most acclaimed, but he wasn’t the first Hoosier poet to gain national fame. Sarah T. Bolton deserves that honor. Even today her poem “Paddle Your Own Canoe” is cited and recited, though few know anything about its origins. Her poetry “was known everywhere,” and the canoe poem…

Editors: The following article (624 words) was released in coincidence with National Employee Freedom Week on Aug. 10-16. A related opinion survey finds that 85 percent of Hoosiers agree with Indiana’s right-to-work law, i.e., that an employee should have the right to decide, without force or penalty, whether to join or leave a labor union.…

TWO POLITICAL STUDIES hit the news this week, seeming to point us in different directions. One, from Princeton University, suggested that average Americans are powerless over the political process. The other, from CNN International, found that only 13 percent of us trust the government to do what is right always or most of the time. You…

By Maryann O. Keating Ph.D. At dinner, the four-year-old reported that her nursery school classmate, Billy, had a bad day and acted mean. When asked what the teacher did, the four-year-old replied wide-eyed, “She took away Billy’s job.” Most of us can empathize with Billy’s symbolic loss of group identity. However, adult unemployment generally is beyond…

THE ETERNAL IMPULSES that argue for consolidated government, regional zoning, county executives, etc., have awakened in our corner of Indiana. Someone forgot, apparently, to drive the stakes through their hearts during the last rising. So we citizens finds ourselves divided by an argument that won’t be resolved in the light of day; that is, rhetorically in…