Busing was Boston’s Selma or Little Rock — an event which stained our city’s reputation around the world and a turning point that signaled a long-overdue series of changes that have radically reshaped Boston, for the better.
Ira Jackson
Posted inOpinion
Some things our 248-year-old democracy and South Africa’s 30-year-young democracy might learn from one another
South Africa and the United States are both blessed with incredible natural and physical assets and resources, but also a still-unresolved, deeply troubled history with apartheid and slavery. Both have the capacity to thrive but are failing to deliver on their promise, largely due to ineffective, corrupt or dysfunctional government and poor governance.
Posted inEconomy
Massachusetts is a 21st century frontier state
AT THE SAME time that chaos was brewing in the House of Representatives in Washington and our Patriots flamed out to the Cowboys in Dallas and then collapsed to the Saints at Gillette, we also witnessed stunning achievements that help to position Massachusetts for the future. Consider just a few of the historic developments of […]
Posted inOpinion
Getting business and government on the same page
WE LIVE in an era of tough and intractable problems, ranging from climate change and racial and income inequality, to an alarming erosion of trust in all our institutions and a profound and immediate crisis of democracy. Eighty-four percent of the public believes that we are on the wrong track and a majority are […]
Posted inOpinion
Post-COVID reimaginings
IN THIS GRIM TIME of a worldwide pandemic, while properly preoccupied by the present crisis, government leaders and leaders of major institutions must also look to the future. As we move to a post-COVID era with phases of relief, recovery, and rebuilding, there must be a parallel phase: reimagining. The COVID crisis has dramatically reshaped […]
Posted inOpinion
Rabindranath Tagore and Bangladesh
TODAY MARKS THE 158TH ANNIVERSARY of the birth of one of the world’s great poets and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore, sometimes referred to as the “Bard of Bengal.” Tagore’s poem Let My Country Awake helped inspire Boston’s CityAwake, but generally he is totally unknown here; most Americans do not usually know that there […]