Sunday Father’s Day Open Thread [6.21.15]

Happy Father’s Day! What do you have on tap to honor your dad, or the men who nurtured you like a father would? I’m on my way to Baltimore to see my Dad for a fun dinner.

The NYT has a great editorial on The Cost of Letting Kids Drift:

The scope of the problem is outlined in a new study of nearly 100 American cities by Measure of America, a policy group at the Social Science Research Council. The study finds that more than 5.5 million people ages 16 to 24 are neither working nor in school, a significantly larger group than before the recession.

At a time when the economy is requiring workers to have higher levels of skills, one in seven of America’s young adults can’t even get started. And even if they find jobs, they are likely to earn significantly less than their peers, be more dependent on public assistance programs and end up worse off physically and mentally than their more fortunate peers.

Frankly, I think this is closer to policy than an accident of the economy. It is easier — right now — to ignore young people who are not working than it is to get the economy oriented to value all of its potential workers.

White Terrorism Is as Old as America:

You could argue, of course, that there are no ghosts of the Confederacy, because the Confederacy is not yet dead. The stars and bars live on, proudly emblazoned on T-shirts and license plates; the pre-eminent symbol of slavery, the flag itself, still flies above South Carolina’s Capitol. The killing has not stopped either, as shown by the deaths of nine black people in a church in Charleston this week. The suspected gunman, who is white and was charged with nine counts of murder on Friday, is said to have told their Bible-study group: “You rape our women, and you are taking over our country. And you have to go.”

Media outlets have been reluctant to classify the Charleston shooting as terrorism, despite how eerily it echoes our country’s history of terrorism. American-bred terrorism originated in order to restrict the movement and freedom of newly liberated black Americans who, for the first time, began to gain an element of political power. The Ku Klux Klan Act, which would in part, lawmakers hoped, suppress the Klan through the use of military force, was one of America’s first pieces of antiterrorism legislation. When it became federal law in 1871, nine South Carolina counties were placed under martial law, and scores of people were arrested. The Charleston gunman’s fears — of black men raping white women, of black people taking over the country — are the same fears that were felt by Klansmen, who used violence and intimidation to control communities of freed blacks.

Yes. Yes. Read the whole thing.