Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Poetry in South Brunswick

I’m in the process of completing a poetry program that will take place during the fall at South Brunswick Library, a series of readings featuring some well-regarded regional and national poets. They will take place at 2 p.m.

Here’s the schedule for the first leg:

More to follow.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Hooray for the 14th

Today we celebrate the constitutional amendment that makes our conception of ourself as a nation possible.

While the First is always first in my heart, the 14th, made a part of the Constitution 138 years ago today, maybe the most significant.

Here is Garret Epps on Salon:

Until the 14th Amendment, the idea of human equality, extolled in the Declaration of Independence, appeared nowhere in the Constitution. The word “equal,” when written in the original document, referred mostly to voting privileges for the states. In addition, the Constitution contained no definition of American citizenship, seemingly leaving the matter to the states.

Even the Bill of Rights itself only covered the federal government — overreaching state governments could, and did, restrict free speech, freedom of religion, due process of law and other basic rights. In short, the Framers of 1787 set up a flawed confederation of insular states, each of which was free to oppress, and even enslave, some or all of its population.

No matter what we’ve been taught in civics class, that original system was a failure. Its flaws led directly to the bloodiest war in American history. After nearly a million deaths, the anti-slavery leaders of Congress set out in 1865 to re-create the United States as a nation, with a powerful central government, democratic institutions at every level and a list of rights no government, state or federal, could violate. Far more than the Framers of 1787, John Bingham, Thaddeus Stevens, William P. Fessenden and the other authors of the 14th Amendment designed the America we live in today. It was, in their vision, to be a unified nation. Local majorities in states were to be barred by federal power from oppressing religious, political or racial minorities. And immigrants were to be a part of the nation as fully as those native-born, considered equal before the courts.

That’s something worth remembering now. Epps reminds us that the immigrant groups of the time — primarily the Germans and the Irish — were viewed as vile and dangerous. They were unlike us, unwilling to assimilate (sound familiar?).

But the authors of the 14th Amendment had a vision, one that should determine the fate of today’s debate over immigration. A strong America, a free America requires that all people be treated with the same respect and dignity, that all people have the same rights — regardless of their color, of their country of origin, of their legal status.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

A widening conflict turning to war




The crisis in Lebanon gets worse and more terrifying. “Troops massing at the border,” real war imminent and the specter of something wider, something drawing in the rest of the
Arab world — possibly drawing in the United State, Europe. Perhaps I’m being paranoid, anxiety rising as I watch the news.

This photos from Reuters — which was posted on MSNBC — seems to sum up this dangerous conflict: the praying soldier (in this case, Israeli) in the shadow of a tank.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.