I’ve always felt the worst thing Donald Trump has done to our country is to lower standards of many Americans. By using Twitter to churn out lies and distortions, he prompts responses by Americans of a better nature to sink to his level. He represents a president of the lowest common denominator. Nowhere is this more currently evident than in journalism where some staff members of The New York Times castigated opinion editor James Bennet, and forced him to resign for publishing a piece by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

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I think it’s hard for many people to understand the systematic racism that triggers violence in America. It’s a bias that most of us, particularly people like me, never think about because we don’t experience it every day, week, or month. That’s why we at CityXones wrote the story of Amorita Falcon for the Crain’s Forum series on long-term problems facing Chicago. She’s a 24-year-old ‘Latinx woman who spends as much — or more — time getting to her job in the Loop as colleagues who live twice as far away as the crow flies.

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Growing up on the North Side of St. Louis, I had a friend named Phil whose Dad was a banker and a Republican. Since I lived in a working-class neighborhood, I thought everyone belonged to a union, was a mailman, cop or fireman and, above all, Irish, Catholic and a Democrat. Poor Phil, I thought, must be tough to be a minority. Phil was a Lutheran, too!

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Normally, I don’t just pass along information I come across about a subject as serious and alarming as COVID-19. I’m a journalist who deals in facts and treats mere claims with considerable skepticism. Years of dealing with “miracle cures” of all sorts as an editor at newspapers taught me to tread carefully when dealing with subjects such as vaccines, more properly the domain of scientists and epidemiologists.

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