Admitting to a Permanent State of War

If we are a country of freedom; if we are hated for our freedoms; if freedom is on the march; if freedom reigns; why are we fighting a war on terror(ism)? Shouldn’t we be working towards freedom from fear?

Good Will to All, With a Side of Soft-Serve – NYTimes.com. Inside, though, this Dairy Queen seems different from the 5,000 others lighting up the country’s summer nights. It has the standard freezer filled with Dilly Bars, and the black-and-white photographs evoking a past that includes the first Dairy Queen, in prison-centric Joliet, Ill., in 1940. But plaques and letters and children’s handwritten notes cover nearly every inch of available wall, all praising someone clearly without Pennsylvania Dutch roots; someone named Hamid.

I’m a big fan of the Independent Press Association of New York. The clippings they get from smaller news outlets, especially those not in English, are phenomenal. I’ve just been catching with my reading of their site, and, perhaps because I was reading so many issues in such a short period of time, and interesting narrative emerged to me about the state of minorities in NY, particularly with respect to political involvement. There seems to be such a distinct sense of disenfranchisement, by that I mean a distance from the political process, that it’s frightening. Even the South Asian American…