Main points: (1) God always provides more than you need. (2) Use well what you’ve got now; only then will you get more. (3) What you abuse, you lose. (4) Absent a disease process, chronic poverty is not a natural condition.

The silent menace • Atrocity in Rio • A hidden epidemic

In the days immediately following the initial mistrial of Baltimore Police Officer William Porter on charges relating to the death of Freddie Gray, Bounce TV broadcast Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing several times. I could not help seeing this as a commentary on the mistrial. Bounce had likewise shown the film several times in the days following the April 2015 riots.

The last straw for certain things came with a Baltimore Sun front page banner headline: I anticipate no response from Julia Craven, Jenee Desmond-Harris, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Stacey Patton, or Brittney Cooper.[*] What was the last straw? In short, it’s time for me to stop concerning myself with racism and race. All my life, I’ve been intensely concerned about both. Countless hours have gone into agonizing over any possible solution. One version of my conclusion is, there is non

Everyone has bootstraps. Everyone.

To get from Point A to Point B, you must move. At this moment, as I write this, I am living in a pit. I am homeless. I face a choice: do I want to get out, or stay here? I could choose to stay here, and continue to just take whatever the world chooses to throw at me; some folk toss in blessings, some toss in trash. There is the question of what to do with the trash I myself create. And what to do with my No. 1s and No. 2s. If I choose to get out — that means work. I must firs