We can remind the world that all the dead on both sides have not settled our differences, so now it is time for the living to renounce violence as a means of solving this conflict.

Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work.

Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity.

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten.

Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we would not let 'born again' patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.

Over the years, I've found that I either live life or write about it. I can't seem to do both simultaneously - I have to do it sequentially. When I write incessantly, I lose touch with the issues and passions that fuel the work. But when I get too involved in organizations or movement endeavors, I almost forget that I'm a writer. It's a constant struggle to find a balance between these two worlds - the solitary writing life and the life of a social justice activist.