It always sounds cliche all of the time, but we have the most important midterms of our lifetimes. We have witnessed clearly an overt clash between fascism (or authoritarianism) and democracy in our society. For example, the bigots of the Afd party and the MAGA movement are far-right extremists who abhor cultural diversity and abhor progressive values in general. Numerous political campaigns have existed from Alaska to Texas (with the race between Talarico and Paxton). We have seen the commercials, the debates, and the political polarization in America. Independent voters are growing in America, as I believe most Americans share both liberal and conservative issues and are not exclusively conservative or exclusively liberal. In our modern-day political lexicon, we know about the terms of gerrymandering, mail in voting, the controversial DSA movement, and the growth of the opposition to the economic affordability crisis. Also, we exist in a generation when more Westerners (not just those who live in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East) support Palestinian human rights today than in any other time in human history. Anti-Semitism is a notorious evil that is in epidemic levels in the world too that must be eradicated. It is important to note that opposing the policies of the pro-MAGA, far right Netanyahu regime in Israel and supporting the human rights of Palestinian people are never akin to anti-Semitism. When people, among across the political spectrum, oppose the illegal, unconstitutional Iranian War, desire to have lower inflation, want more affordability (involving housing, healthcare, groceries, oil prices, etc.), then we have a problem in America that must be addressed or rectifiied. The Trump administration's extremism, bigotry, xenophobia, sexism, racism, and narcissism document how evil exist in the Universe, and we must use all progressive, legitimate means to combat this evil by all legitimate, peaceful means necessary.
Genius is found in the late, great Chadwick Boseman's makeup. He lived a life filled with excellence, promise, and compassion. He formed friends for life when he encountered the actors and actresses of the film Black Panther, like Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Angela Bassett, Daniel Kaluuya, Forest Whitaker, Ryan Coogler, etc. He had massive strength. His life story proved that strength is never about brutality or reckless actions. Truthfully, strength is about a silent confidence and doing diligent, consistent action to help others. He gave a voice to tons of men, especially black men in outlining that message that you must get tested for diseases like colon cancer, prostate cancer, etc. Cancer and other diseases are killing so many men and women at such young ages unfortunately at many circumstances. Boseman was an expert actor who worked in plays constantly. He mastered the art of showing biographical stories via film. He portrayed numerous black icons like Jackie Robinson, James Brown, and the Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He had great mentors like Denzel Washington, who funded Boseman's stip to the British American Drama Academy Summer program in 1998. His other mentors are Phylicia Rashad (she was a mentor to him at Harvard, driving him home from plays, and she pushed for his artistic growth), Howard University professor Mike Malone, and Wayne A. I. Frederick. Chadwick Boseman was one of the greatest actors of the 21st century whose gift always motivated us to be our best selves prodigiously.
Chadwick Boseman was born on November 29, 1976, in Anderson, South Carolina. He grew up in Anderson too. His mother, Carolyn, was a nurse. His father, Leroy, worked at a textile factory and managed an upholstery business. During his youth, Boseman studied martial arts and continued his training as an adult. He wanted to be an architect when he was a child. According to Boseman, his DNA testing indicated that some of his ancestors were the Jola people from Guinea-Bissau, Krio people, and Limba people (from Sierra Leone and Yoruba people from Nigeria). Boseman graduated from T. L. Hanna High School in 1995, where he played on the basketball team. In his junior year, he wrote his first play, Crossroads, and staged it at the school after a classmate was shot and killed. He competed in Speech and Debate in the National Speech and Debate Association at T. L. Hanna. He placed eighth in Original Oratory at the 1995 National Tournament. He was recruited to play basketball at college but chose the arts instead, attending college at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and graduating in 2000 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in directing. While at Howard, he worked in an African American–oriented bookstore near the university, which friend Vanessa German said was important and inspirational to him; he drew on his experience there for his play Hieroglyphic Graffiti.
His teachers at Howard included Al Freeman Jr. and Phylicia Rashad, who became a mentor. Rashad helped raise funds, notably from her friend and prominent actor Denzel Washington, so that Boseman and other classmates could attend the Oxford Summer Program of the British American Drama Academy at Balliol College, Oxford, in England, to which they had been accepted. Boseman wanted to write and direct, and initially began studying acting to learn how to relate to actors. He attended the program in 1998, and he developed an appreciation for the playwriting of William Shakespeare; additionally, he studied the works of various dramatists, including Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. He also traveled to Africa for the first time while at college, working in Ghana with his professor Mike Malone "to preserve and celebrate rituals with performances on a proscenium stage"; he said it was "one of the most significant learning experiences of [his] life." After he returned to the U.S., he took additional course work in film studies, graduating from New York City's Digital Film Academy. Boseman lived in Brooklyn, New York City, at the start of his career. In 2000, he was named a Drama League Directing Fellow. He directed productions including George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum (Wolfe would later direct Boseman in his final role) and a staging of Amiri Baraka's Dutchman. He worked as the drama instructor in the Schomburg Junior Scholars Program, housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem between 2002 and 2009.
He rose to prominence as a playwright and stage actor in 2002, performing in multiple productions and winning an AUDELCO award in 2002 for his part in Ron Milner's Urban Transitions. As a member of the National Shakespeare Company of New York, he played Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and Malcolm in Macbeth. He directed and wrote plays as part of the Hip-hop theater movement; his works included Rhyme Deferred (co-written with Howard classmate Kamilah Forbes), in which he also performed, and Hieroglyphic Graffiti. Rhyme Deferred was commissioned for a national tour, as well as featuring in The Fire This Time anthology of works, while Hieroglyphic Graffiti was produced at a variety of locations, including the National Black Theatre Festival in 2001. Combining modern African-American culture and Egyptian deities, it is set in Washington, D.C., and was picked up by the New York Hip-Hop Theatre Festival and Tennessee State University's summer stock theatre program in 2002. It was also the Kuntu Repertory Theatre's 2002–03 season launch production. At the 2002 Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, Boseman also gave a one-man show called "Red Clay and Carved Concrete."
In 2003, Boseman was cast in his first television role, an episode of Third Watch, and began playing Reggie Montgomery in the daytime soap opera All My Children. He was fired from All My Children after voicing concerns to producers about racist stereotypes in the script; the role was subsequently re-cast, with Boseman's future Black Panther co-star Michael B. Jordan taking the part. Boseman had wanted to work around the stereotypes of the character, feeling that being in a soap opera would give him more room for improvisation as the writers often do not initially plan a full story; his (then-future) agent said that when Boseman was given the second script and learned that his character's parents were a drug addict and an absent father, Boseman confronted the creators. He reflected on the experience in his 2018 commencement address to Howard University, saying that it "seemed to be wrapped up in assumptions about us as black folks [and he] would have to make something out of nothing." His other early television work included episodes of the series Law & Order, Cold Case, CSI: NY, and ER.
Boseman's best-known play, Deep Azure, was commissioned in 2004 by the Congo Square Theatre Company in Chicago. It was nominated for a 2006 Jeff Award for Best New Work. Boseman said at the time that Deep Azure was "a fusion and progression of [his] previous plays", which he did not feel fit wholly in the Hip Hop theater genre. The play – about police brutality, a daring subject in 2004, and largely delivered in rhyme – was workshopped at the Apollo Theater in New York. Drama critic Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune highly praised the work. In 2008, Boseman turned Deep Azure into a screenplay. Michael Greene, who would become his agent, picked it up and contacted Boseman when Tessa Thompson and Omari Hardwick expressed an interest in playing the lead roles, prompting Boseman's move to Los Angeles. He also directed, wrote, and produced the short film Blood Over a Broken Pawn in 2007, which was honored at the 2008 Hollywood Black Film Festival.
Gold is one of the most unique sports in human history. It relies on patience, finesse, and a sense of geography, because gold exists in some of the most diverse terrain in history. Parks and golf locations showcase all manner of situations involving the sport of golf. Most sports exist on flat surfaces like track and field, football, baseball, hockey, tennis, soccer, rugby, and volleyball. Golf can conversely exist on areas of hills, flat locations, near lakes or ponds, and even on higher elevated locations. That is why people in general to determine the best golf clubs and swinging methods to deal with golf games or golf tournaments. In gold, a player must achieve their goals completely to win the game in the least number of strokes possible. Golf legends exist among every color, nationality, and background. Their names are Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, Althea Gibson, Renee Powell, Mariah Stackhouse, Sadena Parks, La'Ree Sugg, Shasta Averyhardt, Cheyenne Woods, Giner Gould, Nelly Korda, Jeeno Thitikul, Annika Sorenstam, Patty Berg, etc.
It has been now over one century since the advent of the news channel of NBC. It has been a staple of news, sports, entertainment, and other forms of information geared to inform the general population. I love NBC's coverage of the Olympic Games like the recent 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris(being one of the most successful Olympics for American victories) and the 2026 Winer Olympics in Milan-Cortina, Italy. The coverage didn't just show the sporting events. It outlined summaries of the stories, emotions, and mentalities of the athletes who participated in such athletic endeavors. NBC works as a family even among competing franchises like CNN, MS NOW, ABC, etc. In our time, the Trump regime abhor press freedom so much that dissents with him, that Trump once banned CNN, MS Now, and Politico from having access to the White House. Recently, Trump has been petty to ban certain news outlets on certain locations. These actions are so fragantly anti-free speech and anti-press freedom, that even FOX News condemned Trump's anti-press measures. There were iconic hosts on the Today Show like Barbar Walters, Hoda Kotb, Deborah Norville, Bryant Gumbel, Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw, Jane Pauley, etc. NBC has SNL, Meet the Press with Kristen Welker, and local affiliates like WAVY TV-10 (that I watch on a regular basis) in Hampton Roads, Virginia (or the 757). Then and now, NBC had shown television shows like Cheers, Seinfeld, A Different World, The Cosby show, The West Wing, ER, Law and Order, and Friday Night Lights.
Jackie Joyner Kersee has been a social activist for decades. The Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation was created in 1988 in her hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois, to empower the youth and families. The JJK Center is a multi-purpose facility that was created by her to provide safe spaces, after-school programming, athletics, and academic support. She has promoted K-12 development, youth entrepreneurship, and JJK Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition Innovation Center (JJK FAN) to address food access. She partnered with many technology initiatives like Comcast's Internet Essentials to bring high-speed internet to low-income families to promote children's education and digital equity. She has spoken out in favor of civil rights, racial equality, and systemic reform. Jackie Joyner-Kersee promoted Title IX and equal opportunities, funding, and facility access for women athletes. She had severe asthma back then, and she actively campaigns for health education and youth wellness.
Since 1981, the Jesse Owens Award has been given by USATF (and before its renaming, TAC) to the United States' track and field athlete of the year. In 1996, the award was split to be given to the top athlete of each gender. In 2005, she was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the State's highest honor) by the Governor of Illinois in the area of Sports. In 2010, she was a NCAA Silver Anniversary Awards honoree. In 2011, she received the Dick Enberg Award, College Sports Information Director of America (CoSIDA). By 2021, she received the Webster University Doctor of Humane Letters. In 2013, the female award was renamed the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Award. In March 2023, she was inducted into the International Sports Hall of Fame.
Jackie Joyner Kersee was a great mentor to many athletes. She has mentored the modern-day heptathlete Anna Hall. She calls and texts her with advice, encouragement, and technical mindset tips. Anna Hall was born in the Mountain West in Denver, Colorado on March 23, 2001. She is now 25 years old. She has done the heptathlon, the pentathlon, the 400m, the 400m hurdles, the 800m and the high jump. She was involved in the Florida Gators and the Georgia Bulldogs. She worked hard to win bronze in the heptathlon at the 2022 World Championships in Eugene, Oregon, silver in the same sport in the 2023 World Championships in Budapest, and in the same event at the 2025 Tokyo World Championships with winning gold. She won silver in the World Indoor Championships in the pentathlon in 2026 at Torun, Poland. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in business administration in December 2023. She is married to New York Giants player Darius Slayton since April 11, 2026. Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone was coached by the husband of Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Bob Kersee. The torch has been passed from Jackie Joyner-Kersee to many younger Americans and people of many other nationalities to bring the sport of track and field into the 21st century and beyond.
Judge Judy's recent comments are not only wrong but hypocritical. She said that people who want to fundamentally change America should go somewhere else. Using her logic, abolitionists wanted to fundamentally change America to ban slavery legally should stop doing it. Using her logic, people in the Civil Rights Movement who wanted to fundamentally change America to pass civil rights plus voting rights laws should quit. America was built by 3 groups of people. It was build by us black Americans, by immigrants, and by the indigenous people. Without us black people, America would never be what it is with its diversity, culture, and excellence. People have the right to disagree with many policies of America as critiquing America is part of the First Amendment via the freedom fo speech. People have the right to live in America plus love or not like America. True Patriotism is about improving America not having a hive mind to unconditionally support all things in America. Also, she praises the capitalist system, but we don't live in a completely capitalist society. We live basically in a country of America with a mixed economy. Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, etc. are government created nearly socialist programs. Capitalism, socialism, and communism aren't infallible. For example, when people were starving to death, people protested not seeking laissez faire capitalism to handle issues. They wanted a New Deal that expanded the government massively to save human lives literally. Therefore, what works best is a nation with the government having power to provide services and the public sector plus the private sector having legitimate regulations to make sure that we have clean air, clean water, healthcare rights, and human rights in general.
By Timothy
