Last Monday marked the one-month anniversary of the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which left twenty very young children and six adult employees of Sandy Hook Elementary School dead. Since that time, we have grieved with parents over the unimaginable loss of their children--both in the soft-focus glow of candles and in a harsher kind of light. Some have rushed to buy more guns , ammunition, and body-armor for their children ( literally ). There have been other shootings, and more than 1000 people have died from gun violence since the Newtown shooting happened. The NRA issued its...

Finally, the election is over. After such a contentious and lengthy battle over the direction our country will take for the next four years, we can all calm down, shake hands, and get on with life (is anyone else LOVING Nashville ?). Let's all heave a sigh of relief, right? Oh. Wait, what? We're not heaving a sigh of relief? Well, what are we doing? Oh. We are laughing at each other and gloating about winning. We're deliberately annoying and antagonizing each other, like this gun shop owner , who has decided that having voted for Obama proves you are too irresponsible to own a firearm. We're...

My mother tells me that our family is distantly related, through her father's side, to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, brothers famous for collecting and publishing fairytales that Disney later made even more famous. One of their lesser-known stories has been on my mind lately, mainly because I think it's an excellent metaphor for how social privilege works; social privilege has been on my mind lately because the incredibly privileged Mitt Romney recently called about half the country useless, lazy schlubs (I'm paraphrasing here). The story is called "The Elves and the Shoemaker," and it goes,...