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Crime

Doing Time for Committing No Crime

I suppose there’s never a good time to be wrongfully imprisoned, but now is as close to good as it gets. Today, Michael Anthony Green is scheduled to be a free man for the first time in 27 years. Green is now the longest-serving inmate to be exonerated in Texas. He was wrongfully convicted of rape in 1983.

A New Normalcy

Epiphanies occur in a host of places. In America, mine often came about in the shower. This is probably due to a habit I purposefully instilled from grade school. I know its cheesy but I’ve sort of always wanted to become a writer. When I was in elementary school, I remember reading an interview of a famous author who said she did her best thinking in the bathtub. I thought this was a great idea and started to sit in an empty bathtub, fully clothed to do my serious, grown-up 8-year-old-thinking. This matured into pensive showers, and I can trace many good ideas, stories or not, to soapy-lathers and pumice boards. I don’t think my pondering pattern would’ve changed had I not moved to Ukraine. I’ve been forced to find new sanctuaries in the past year, as a bucket bath is not nearly as conducive to contemplation as its cousin the shower. Lately my startling realizations have come in two far less sexy places: on the phone and in front of my laptop.

Hug a tree for Jesus

With the election looming and voter turnout up across the board, the youth vote has attracted its fair share of attention. Harvard University’s Institute of Politics reports that for the first time since Richard Nixon was in office, young people are turning out to vote in high numbers. Perhaps more interesting than sheer volume is how we youngsters are voting and why.