Hits and Misses
Davon McNeal, an 11-year-old who lived in Washington, D.C., and Royta De’Marco Giles, an 8-year-old who lived in Hoover, Ala., almost certainly never crossed paths with one another and may have had little in common. But they are bound together by one grim fact – both died of gunshot wounds on Fourth of July weekend. CNN reported they were among at least six children who were felled while they were doing commonplace kid stuff, like playing and shopping. Soon to enter the third grade, Giles had dreams of entering the music industry before he was cut down in a suburban mall in a crossfire between two teenagers. Three other people were injured. McNeal was shot when he was going into a house to get a phone charger. In Chicago, Natalia Wallace, 7, was shot and killed while playing outside. In Atlanta, Secoriea Turner, just 8, was shot while in a car with her mother and another adult. Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta’s mayor, said, “We’re fighting the enemy within when we are shooting each other up in our streets.” If children being murdered senselessly doesn’t shock the conscience, and spur efforts to place reasonable controls on the guns that have flooded our streets, then what will?
Need an Exhibit A in the argument that you shouldn’t believe everything you see on social media? Look no further than the militia groups and other far-right true believers that descended on Gettysburg last weekend after social media posts stated that groups from the far left would be there to rip down statues and burn flags. One post even stated that small flags would be given away to children “to safely throw into the fire.” Well, it turns out the gullible militia members found no one there, except for one man wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, though he was there to see the site, not to protest. All in all, everyone who was there to defend the red, white and blue should feel a little red in the face.
Apparently starved for attention, musician Kanye West has announced he is running for president. Of course, entertainers making the leap into politics and being successful at it is not without precedent – Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sonny Bono are all high-profile examples. But there’s plenty of reason to believe that voters will be unable to vote for West in November unless they write in his name. First, it’s impossible to imagine West being interested in the tedious work of getting on state ballots. Then, he is running under the banner of the Birthday Party, claims to have never voted in his life, and says that if he makes it to the White House, it will follow the organizational model of the fictional land of Wakanda from the movie “Black Panther.” West’s bid makes the serial presidential bids of comedian Pat Paulsen between 1968 and 1996 look like models of sobriety in comparison.
We should be glad a company like Duolingo is in our region. Valued at $1.5 billion, it’s created a language-learning website and mobile app, and has 23 open positions in Pittsburgh right now. But Luis von Ahn, Duolingo’s CEO and co-founder, warned in a tweet earlier this week that the company might have to relocate to Canada, “if the U.S. policies against (extremely qualified) immigration continue.” The Trump administration has prohibited issuing several types of temporary work visas, and the policy has come under fierce attack from business leaders, who fear it will strangle innovation and prevent us from attracting talent from elsewhere. The possibility of Duolingo’s departure makes it clear how America could lose, thanks to short-sighted policies.