Jun 26, 2015 4 min read

Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States as compiled by the Associated Press:

As if flying weren’t aggravating enough these days – tighter seats, less legroom, slow check-ins – now airlines want to downsize carry-on luggage.

Most domestic carriers charge passengers $25 or more to check a suitcase for every one-way trip, so it’s no wonder the industry wants to divert more luggage to a plane’s hold. Evidently 2014’s record profits weren’t big enough, while airfares were the highest since 2003.

Yet, these baggage fees, which inflate the price of a ticket, lead many passengers to drag ever-bigger bags onto the plane and jam them into overhead bins, thereby adding to the time it takes everyone to board.

If smaller carry-ons will lead to less boarding time and less wrestling in the aisle with bulky suitcases, travelers may not mind the new restrictions. But that presumes airlines’ gate employees will weed out bags that exceed the limit. At a time of low customer service, that’s a big if.

It has been more than 50 years since Ku Klux Klansmen planted a bomb in the basement of the predominantly black 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.

Just before Sunday services on the morning of Sept. 15, 1963, that bomb exploded, killing four young girls and injuring many more church members. In an era in which white supremacists were determined to maintain racial segregation by any means necessary, the murder of those four girls helped shape a national consciousness that deplored such violence and increased support of civil rights for African-Americans.

In Charleston, S.C., June 17, a young man who espoused white supremacist ideology entered another predominantly African-American church that has a long and glorious history in the fight for equal rights and civil rights, and sat through an hour of Bible study before he fatally shot nine people.

The question America has to ask itself now is whether this nation has the courage and will to use this tragic event in a house of peace to have a serious discussion about gun violence and racial hatred.

We realize anything we say in this space is not going to change the minds of most gun rights advocates. However, we can fairly say easy access to firearms makes it easier for hate-filled or insane people to inflict horrendous carnage on people they consider enemies. We also are aware of the toll gun violence is wreaking in America’s inner cities.

Beyond that debate, though, the massacre at Emanuel AME Church could be a watershed moment, a turning point in the never-ending debate about race relations similar to the change wrought in America’s consciousness sparked by the Birmingham church bombing.

It is an astonishing number: the United Nations estimates violence and poverty have displaced 60 million people around the globe. It is a number that takes us back to the catastrophic era of World War II, when vast populations of refugees roamed the European continent and war-torn regions of Asia.

What is happening is a catastrophic collapse of the nation state. The boundary lines between nations are being erased, as in Syria and Iraq, and as can be seen in Central Africa in the continuing trouble in Congo, Burundi and Central African Republic, not to mention trouble in the West African nations of Nigeria and Mali.

The response of the West must be twofold. We need to promote stability, which is never easy. The second element of the West’s response must be compassion. Helping to settle people humanely satisfies the demands of human rights, but also fosters stability. People without a home, living in want and resentment, become a perennial source of new conflict. Palestinians are still living in refugee camps created after the 1948 war. Their grievances have never been satisfied.

Nations have to step forward as they did after World War II to recognize the human catastrophe happening at the moment.