Category: Indiana Writers Group

I FOUND MYSELF at a luncheon some time ago where the speaker was a local businessman. The speech was like many I have heard in recent years: a mix of crony capitalism and social justice with a splash of mercantilism toward the end. In his talk, civic progress depended on public-private partnerships (where risk is borne by that amorphous entity,…

by Leo Morris During my tenure as president of one of the nonprofit boards I served on, there was a dispute between board members and the executive director over something the director proposed to do. He thought – and about half the board agreed with him – that the action would be consistent with his…

WHENEVER THE NEWS from the southern border worsens, we distribute as a public service this summary of the great Arnold Toynbee’s 12-volume “Study of History,” finished in 1961. It describes in present tense his cycle of a civilization, as prescient as it is troubling: “The third response (of a declining civilization) concerns the implosion of boundaries. Extension of empire is weakening its power to…

MANY OF THE BEST U.S. historians — David McCullough and Gordon Wood come to mind — have pointed out the flaws in the New York Times “1619 project.” It nonetheless continues to be proposed for inclusion in the K-12 curriculum, a tract that suggests the United States was born with racial inequality and white supremacy as its DNA, and…

by Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. Job availability for inexperienced workers is the primary reason why most economists object to raising the minimum wage.      The proposedRaise the Wage Act of 2021 (H.R. 603) would raise the federal minimum wage in steps to $15 an hour by 2025. Presently, most states have set a higher minimum wage,…

by Mark Franke “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet.” Recall that advertising jingle from 1974? It had quite a catchy tune and was a successful advertising campaign by all accounts. Think back to what America was like in 1974. There was the Watergate scandal, resulting in the resignation of an elected president. The Vietnam…

by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. I wonder if I’ll get “canceled” someday. I could trip up and say something awkward or inappropriate — and get crushed for it. It could be a phrase in a Facebook post or a newspaper article like this. It could be a slip in the classroom that gets reported by a…

by Leo Morris None of my best friends are black. OK, I apologize. I did that just to get your attention. We have become so race conscious in the last couple of years, I figured that sentence would cause everybody to read further, if for no other reason than to see if I would say…

Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge. ~ Carl Jung A FRIEND THINKS he was present at the beginning of critical race theory. It was a seventh-grade bible study in the early 1960s in a small town on the Great Plains.  A student from a nearby college was leading the study and, hoping for a…

by Leo Morris I’ve been trying to make sense of NFTs, those digital creations called “non-fungible tokens” that can sell for millions of dollars. So, naturally, I thought of the squirrel.  It showed up one day underneath the tree that stood in the outdoor break area for Fort Wayne Newspapers, the umbrella company for the…