Editorial

For decades the U.S. has imprisoned a higher percentage of its residents than any other country. It has always seemed inconsistent for the nation of “liberty and justice for all” to have so many people in jail.

Mayor Marty Walsh’s appointment of William Gross as Boston’s police commissioner was well received by those residents who are eager for racial diversity in the city administration. However, it is good to remember that change often brings conflict. There are presently a number of changes confronting Boston’s police force.

Violence has been a common strategy of whites to impede black economic progress. In addition to economic attacks on black towns, racial discrimination against individual black entrepreneurs has made it difficult for blacks to prosper in private enterprise.

New Jersey Democratic Senator Corey Booker flatly called the Georgia gubernatorial election a theft for GOP winner Brian Kemp. This was not partisan hyperbole. Thousands of eligible votes weren’t registered, were tossed, discounted, or ignored. The process was only slightly less muddled and outrageous in Florida where there were also widespread reports of irregularities, incompetence, fraud and manipulation.

All human beings belong to one species. We might look different and have different color hair and eyes, but we nonetheless all belong to one family. That’s too many for Thanksgiving dinner but not too many for human love.

What I’ve come to learn as a physician is that the ER is where the failures of public policy present themselves in their most crude, violent, and visceral form. Yes, we must have strong gun control laws on the books, but we must also address the conditions that allow violence to foster and create a situation where a young woman can be shot in the head during daylight hours.

Numerous programs across the country attempt to return felons released from prison to useful lives. An important element of these efforts is for the released prisoners to become active in community affairs. However, restrictions on the voting rights of felons have impeded progress.

The U.S. Constitution grants every citizen the right to vote, but somehow not every state has received the memo. Some state governments have made access to the polls more arduous for Democrats. With the size of support for Republicans withering, the strategy for victory has become to reduce the vote count for Democrats by any means necessary.

The results of the recent midterm election will have little impact on one of the nation’s leading problems — anti-Semitism and racial discrimination against blacks.

There has been a long-standing opposition to slavery in Boston. In fact, Massachusetts was the first state of the union to render slavery unlawful. The human rights of freedom and equality were established in 1783 in the Massachusetts Constitution. That was four years before the approval of the U.S. Constitution and 82 years before the ratification of its 13th Amendment that decreed slavery to be unlawful throughout the republic. It is a bit late to be concerned about Peter Faneuil’s involvement in the slave trade.

Prominent Republicans are reluctant to restrain a defiant presidency. There are few ways for voters to express their disapproval. One tactic is to vote a straight Democratic ticket as a rejection of what the Republican Party has become.

Last year, 99 percent of the 9th grade students at Brooke High School performed at the highest level of any school in the state on the biology MCAS test. This year, all of the 10th graders scored proficient or higher on all three MCAS tests — English Language Arts (ELA), math and science. Brooke was the only high school in the state to do so.