Cagle World

I really hate the phrase “it’s a teachable moment.”

People use it whenever they want to pretend that someone who messed up is going to regret her mistakes. This whole idea of redemption is wishful thinking, because very few people come out the other side of a major debacle with humility and self-awareness.

I don’t forgive Whoopi Goldberg for being a privileged putz. I doubt she’s a true anti-Semite, although who knows. Jew-hating is a common activity among the woke preachers of the 21st century, just as anti-Catholicism has been an acceptable “flaw” in otherwise tolerant folk. But again, I’m pretty sure Whoopi doesn’t harbor animus towards the children of Abraham.

But she’s a privileged, liberal loudmouth who’s made a career standing in judgment of lesser humans. Actually, a second career. Once upon a time, she was actually quite humorous and charming, a comedian with classic timing. That was before she started hating conservative white people, many of whom spent good money on her shows. And I don’t forgive her for that.

I also don’t forgive her for presuming that she can use her bully pulpit to rewrite history, and tell the world that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. I don’t forgive her for implying that the thing that attracts bigots and places innocents in danger is the color of their skin. When Whoopi actually suggested that her Jewish friend could avoid a racially motivated assault because he was protected by his melanin (or lack thereof,) I literally got sick to my stomach.

I oppose cancellation. I heed the warnings of Orwell who identified the thought police generations before they acquired smart phones. Bad speech should be fought with better speech. Silencing evil doesn’t destroy it, it simply gives it subterranean channels in which to travel and multiply.

But there are consequences for those who deliberately mislabel six million corpses as the victims of white supremacy. What Whoopi did in saying that the Holocaust was not about killing Jews was to erase them. What she did was, in her own sly way, was dehumanization. She needed to make her own, personal brand of racism (anti-Black) into the only “official” sort of racism. She denied the truth, represented in the Shoah, of six million shredded destinies. And she did it over again, even after presenting a forced pseudo apology.

Is there anything worse than fabricated remorse? We can smell it, and Whoopi’s apology had a mighty stench. It was the “I’m sorry” of someone who resented being called out. And it should not be accepted.

There is nothing wrong with firing her because, in doing so, we can confirm that even the vaguest form of Holocaust denial delegitimizes the voice that utters it. Many will criticize my call for firing as hypocritical since I’ve attacked cancel culture in almost every column I’ve written, but I don’t think taking a powerful woman like Whoopi off of one of her platforms really silences her. In fact, it might actually amplify her voice, particularly if she can play the grievance card expertly enough. But Whoopi is not the wronged party here, and we have to distinguish between bearing the consequences of our actions, and being a true victim of censorship.

My friend Paul Missan, an attorney and proud Nether Providence graduate who cherishes his faith and identity as a Jewish man and father of proud Jewish children, wrote this to me in the wake of Whoopi’s comments:

“To me it is very reprehensible the double standard that Jews have to live with in this ultra-liberal environment where it is OK for someone to make a blatantly anti-Semitic statement while synagogues are being attacked and Jews are murdered and held hostage. Can you imagine the outrage if someone said that slavery was not racist? Well slavery was racist. And there’s no greater example of racism then the Holocaust where six million Jews were murdered because of their race. The fact is that looking Caucasian does not prevent one from being victimized in a hate crime.”

I can’t say it any better than that.

And if we’re really looking for a teachable moment, let’s take away this lesson: inhumanity comes in every shade of being, victimizes every race, targets every creed and crushes the invisible, colorless spirit of every creature known to God.

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Copyright 2022 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Exactly ten years ago, the Supreme Court was presented with a case involving affirmative action. The majority rejected a policy employed by the University of Texas which allowed it to consider race as one factor in its admissions decisions. A majority of the court rejected the university’s arguments that this was a good way to achieve “diversity,” and sent the case back to the lower courts to determine if “strict scrutiny” justified the use of the policy.

Justice Clarence Thomas, an avowed foe of affirmative action, filed a separate opinion. He concurred in the result, which was decided largely on procedural grounds. But he wrote separately to express his opposition to any sort of race-based policy.

Thomas has always taken the position that giving someone an advantage because of their race ends up causing what he called “insidious consequences” of “racial engineering.” That’s made him a reviled figure among the sort of folks who think that race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin and a host of other immutable characteristics should be the basis for assigning honors, providing opportunities and assessing achievement.

Well, Thomas is about to get a companion on the high, and according to President Biden, it’s going to be a woman of color. In other words, Biden is going to use the litmus test of race to determine who ascends to the highest court in the land, the one that has consistently told us that discrimination is illegal.

Biden hasn’t said that race and gender will be “one of the ways” in which he chooses Justice Stephen Breyer’s replacement. He’s pretty much made it clear that this will the threshold decision, and that only after he narrows the selection pool to women of color, he can then look at other qualifications like, uh, merit.

And that’s a huge disservice to women of color, white women, men of color, and pretty much every other human being out there who wants a fair shot at showing their value. What Biden is doing is engaging in just the sort of racism that professor John McWhorter describes in his book “Woke Racism,” and that Justice Thomas described in his memoir. In a passage that breaks your heart, because you know that he is speaking from a heart that was likely broken many times over because of bigotry, Thomas writes about what he calls the “paternalistic” form of racism that buttresses affirmative action:

“At least southerners were up front about their bigotry; you knew exactly where they were coming from. Not so the paternalistic big-city whites who offered you a helping hand so long as you were careful to agree with them, but slapped you down if you started acting as if you didn’t know your place.”

Biden isn’t new to this rodeo. About 15 or so years ago, before he was tapped to be Barack Obama’s running mate, he described the future president as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate, bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” He later apologized, insisting that he was taken out of context.

Biden has been backed into a corner by the radical left wing of his party, for whom identity politics is mother’s milk. He is forced to mouth all of the appropriate platitudes about it being time to have a woman of color on the court, which he likely means “Black” woman since I’m sure the wise Latina considers herself to be a woman of color, among other things. But we all understand the game, and how it must be played these days.

To be fair, Joe isn’t the first president to play it. Presidents from the left and the right have made a big deal about appointing women, including Reagan, Clinton, Obama and Trump. It’s always been troublesome, because ovaries are not the organs that should matter when choosing a justice. Biden is just upping the ante, now, with race.

Given that Breyer is a liberal, the balance of power won’t be impacted by the new nominee. It’s going to remain a 6-3 court.

The real problem is the idea that a president can get up and actually say that he will limit his choice of nominees for one of the most crucial and important positions on the court to a specific race and gender. He may change his position in the coming weeks, although with AOC types breathing down his neck, he wouldn’t dare unless Jill provides a better defense for him than the Bucs did for Tom Brady.

So get ready for that “articulate, bright and clean nice-looking woman,” coming to a court near you.

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Copyright 2022 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

The other day, I went to a movie, and the experience moved me to tears.

It was the most recent version of “Macbeth,” brought to the screen by the great Denzel Washington, appearing alongside a combination of veteran actors (like the sublime Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth) and talented newcomers. That, added to the amazing black and white cinematography, lifted this film to the next level.

As I was walking home, something dawned on me. Denzel Washington is a Black man that took on the role of a medieval Scottish king speaking Shakespearean English, and no one in the theater batted an eye. Thank God they didn’t.

There have long been examples of this sort of cross-pollination of talent. White men have often played Othello, the Moor of Venice, donning blackface when that was still permitted. James Caan inhabited the characters of two famous Italians, one real and one fictional: Brian Piccolo and Sonny Corleone. Al Pacino, a real Italian, played a Cuban in “Scarface,” and Meryl Streep has been Dutch, Australian, German, Italian, Jewish, WASP, British, and the entire Security Council of the United Nations over her storied career.

Until recently, no one has had a problem with artists being artists, and manifesting the glories of literature, theater, music, history, food, poetry and all of the things that make living worthwhile. Longfellow was able to write about Hiawatha without Native Americans screaming about how he had no idea what was going on in their wigwams. Ernest Hemingway was able to write about a Cuban fisherman in his twilight years, fighting the last great battle of his life, without people protesting that a guy from landlocked Idaho had no idea what it meant to be a Latino on the sea. Charles Dickens was able to write about ghosts, without people pointing out the trenchant fact that he was still, apparently, alive.

A few years ago, some overly-sensitive Latino groups were up in arms because a non-Mexican woman wrote a book called “American Dirt” about the experience of, you guessed it, a Mexican woman who illegally crossed the border. As an immigration attorney who has handled countless cases of Mexican women in similar circumstances, I can pretty much guarantee that you don’t need to be Mexican, or an immigrant, to understand their particular plight. To suggest otherwise is pure arrogance.

And this is just the literary world. As I noted before, Denzel Washington, a Black American channeled his native genius into a role that he was born to play. I honestly think that his version of Macbeth matches that of Olivier, or Orson Welles, or any of the other great Anglo-Saxon actors who took on the challenge. Skin color was completely irrelevant.

Unfortunately, because of the culture warriors who demand that gay roles only be played by gay actors, or trans roles only be played by trans actors, or Latino roles only be played by Latino (or God help us, Latinx) actors, or female roles only be played by women (tell that to Shakespeare) or Asian roles only be played by Asians, or Black roles only be played by Blacks, it’s now a “thing.”

And that’s tragic, because it balkanizes the world, forcing us into these sterile little categories based on identity. I don’t give a damn what the sexual orientation of the fellow who plays Richard III is, since the whole point of acting is to transcend the physical, the obvious, and raise it to the next level. I don’t care if the person playing Oscar Wilde is straight as an arrow, or the person playing Cleopatra can’t spell the word Mesopotamia, or the person playing Mussolini comes from a long line of O’Haras. What difference does it make?

The identity fascists are out to destroy the quality and character of culture, and they are doing it because they think checking off boxes like the columns on a Chinese menu elevate society. They want quotas based on color and not on competence. They demand that we honor culture by essentially neutering it, and they are ruthless in their willingness to take down anyone who dissents.

I was thrilled to see one of the greatest actors of our generation play one of the greatest roles of any generation. We need more of it, and less of the “stay in your lane” mentality. As the great Sidney Poitier, who knew something about fighting stereotypes once said, “I never had occasion to question color, therefore, I only saw myself as what I was…a human being.”

In the end, that’s all that we are, and the rest is irrelevant societal trapping. And we can honor art, and ourselves without having to be afraid of offending someone who thinks they own the history of their ancestors.

To quote another Shakespearean hero, one a bit more likeable than the Scottish King, “This above all, to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

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Copyright 2022 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

When it became obvious that the Titanic was not going to survive its tragic collision with the iceberg in the North Atlantic, those in positions of authority started to do the human triage necessary in emergencies. Who would be saved, who would perish, and who would be empowered with those impossible decisions?

Ultimately, it came down to the formula used from the beginning of civil society: Women and children first.

Until now, in the COVID era.

I’ve watched with horror as we closed down the schools without any notice. An argument can be made that at the beginning of the pandemic when we had few facts about what this beast was, and how it was transmitted, it made sense to stop the clocks and lock the doors. Fear and ignorance warranted drastic measures.

Then, as we began to see the horrific impact of virtual schooling on young children, we started opening up the classrooms. Some were more courageous, like many private and Catholic schools across the country. They either understood more quickly than the others exactly how much damage was being done to these kids, or they were more motivated to mitigate the damage as soon as they discovered it.

But even when the schools opened, they forced the children to wear masks, even when studies showed that transmission in academic settings was minimal. A widely-cited article in The Atlantic by David Zweig pointed out the flawed methodology used to argue that schools that had mask mandates had fewer cases of COVID than those without. It’s wrong, and the CDC keeps citing this baseless study for its mask crusade.

This was before omicron, which is a monster on steroids and can be passed as easily as the common cold. Now it might be prudent to use masks if we can actually establish they stop the spread of omicron, but that Atlantic article and voluminous anecdotal evidence prove that at least with the alpha and delta versions of the virus, that simply isn’t the case. And even when there are cases in the school setting, they don’t impact the young to anywhere near the same degree as adults.

The fact that we are now debating whether children should be vaccinated is much more troubling than hermetically sealing them in useless pieces of cloth and paper. Vaccines, we were told, prevented you from getting the virus. That turned out not to be true. Vaccines, we were told, prevented you from transmitting the virus. That also turned out not to be true. And while there is legitimate, substantial evidence to prove that vaccines do minimize the severity of the illness, that’s not enough to mandate vaccines for kids. Not even close.

According to the most recent federal data, less than 5,000 children nationwide have been hospitalized with COVID, and a much smaller number have been hospitalized specifically because of COVID. This is not the 100,000 kid apocalypse mentioned by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her remarks from the bench last week in support of Biden’s vaccine mandate.

In reality, it’s the adults who are jumping into those lifeboats, trying desperately to save their own lives with very little concern for the health and safety of the children. They may talk the good talk about protecting the young ones, but the teachers who marched out of Chicago public schools earlier this month didn’t give a damn about their students. They were worried about themselves.

And guess what? It’s okay to admit that, as long as they admit that. But they don’t. These adults are trying to make it seem as if they are noble guardians of childhood, ensuring that their wide-eyed little charges are protected against the big bad GOP bogeymen.

But since the federal numbers show that kids aren’t filling up emergency rooms, and respected journalists like David Zweig are showing that masks really don’t have the salutary impact we’re promised, and the CDC admits that getting vaccinated protects you against the virus (or at least minimizes the harm) but does little or nothing to stop you from infecting someone else, why are we engaging in these debates to begin with?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because the mantra is no longer “women and children first.” It’s “jump into whatever boat you can find, the kids be damned.” It’s “ignore the mental anguish of isolated children so you can feel safe in your virtual bubble with your virtual lesson plans.” It’s “yap your lips on TV cable networks in front of adoring, gullible viewers, and tell them that they can virtue signal the virus into submission.”

And that works, as long as you don’t turn your heads to look back at the kids standing on the deck, as the ship sinks deeper into the dark water.

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Copyright 2022 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

When my sister texted to tell me that Sidney Poitier had passed away, and I started crying.

All I could do was conjure up the black and white image of a beloved movie, “A Patch of Blue,” the film that made me fall in love with Poitier. It’s a powerful movie that carries as strong a message about anti-racism as “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner,” without its political posturing and preachiness.

It’s a simple story, about a young blind woman with an abusive mother and a loving but alcoholic “Opa,” or grandfather. One day, sitting in the park and working on the necklaces she sells to bring in a little money, a storm arises and her carefully organized tray of beads spills out onto the grass. It’s at that point that the Poitier character, passing through the park, runs to help her. A friendship develops. That friendship turns into love, at least from the young girl’s perspective. Poitier’s affection is a complicated mixture of attraction, brotherly protection and pity.

The most compelling part of the nascent relationship is that the young girl’s blindness prevents her from realizing that her new friend is Black. In a very literal sense, she is color blind. He, on the other hand, is not, and understands the problems that the racial divide presents. This movie was filmed in 1965, when Jim Crow was a reality, not just a historical disgrace.

Poitier was the first Black man to win an Academy Award, for his performance as an itinerant handyman in “Lillies of the Field.” The scene where he teaches a group of Catholic nuns to sing the Negro spiritual “Amen” is both humorous and deeply moving. And that movie is, itself, a simple prayer that different races, different genders and different faiths cannot just coexist, they can glorify the God that created them.

And then there was “To Sir With Love”, the movie that showed the power that respect, empathy, good manners and a sense of self-worth can have on those who were born with no privilege, and end up saddled with the low expectations of generational poverty. The titular song, sung by Lulu, is an ode to the teachers who care-often to their own detriment-for children who will grow up, and go away. Perhaps the public school teachers in Chicago, and all the others who refuse to go back into their classrooms, should watch it.

And we can’t forget “In The Heat of the Night,” a movie that always reminds me of my father when I see it because it tells the story of a Philadelphian who encounters blood-deep racism in the 1960s south. Unlike my father, Virgil Tibbs is Black, and Poitier inhabits him with the natural instincts of a man who was not used to overt racism, encounters it, and finds a way to minimize the stain, relationship by fraught relationship.

I do not write movie reviews. I don’t have the talent or the technical knowledge to be able to persuade or dissuade a stranger from enjoying a film. I just watch what I like.

But I needed to write about these films, which have had such an impact on me. Poitier won his Oscar in 1964, and I’ve grown up my entire life in the shadow of his work. He’s been quiet for many years, a well-deserved last chapter of a brilliantly-told story. He earned his peace.

And yet, the messages in his movies were like a thread woven through my own life, as I grew to understand the evils of racism, the importance of humility, the searing scars of domestic abuse, the crack in the country, north to south, the power of the English language, spoken properly and with respect for its innate poetry, the beauty of loud and boisterous praise, and the fragility of human relationships.

In every one of his movies, Sidney Poitier presented us with possibilities of greatness, not on battlefields or in laboratories or even on the stage, but within ourselves. He showed us what we could be like, if we weren’t saddled with bigotry, impatience, intolerance and probably the worst thing of all: apathy.

That dignity earned him some criticism from people who thought he should have been less a gentleman and more a rabble rouser like Malcolm X in the service of equality. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, he addressed the issue of always having to be defined by race: “I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life. There are those who allow their lives to be defined only by race. I correct anyone who comes at me only in terms of race.”

And that’s why we loved him, because he put humanity above identity.

His life, lived like the most perfect prayer, should end like his greatest film: With an Amen.

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Copyright 2022 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

The other day I was engaged in a surprisingly civil Twitter conversation with a person who identified as a “trans” woman. I took that to mean that she was a biological male, but presented as a female. I was right.

It actually didn’t take much skill to figure it out, since being “trans” means being something other than what you formerly were. “Trans” is short for transition, and in order to transition, you need to have been somewhere or something else first. A butterfly does not “transition” into another butterfly. It started out as something else, namely, a chrysalis.

The thing about many trans people, though, is that they don’t want you to remember that they were something else. They insist on saying that they were “born” into the wrong body, which means that they were always the gender they want to be, just displaced. That’s why this particular trans person took umbrage when I used the phrase “biological female” to describe myself and other women who had, to quote Lady Gaga, been born that way. She indicated that it was hurtful.

I hate to be unintentionally hurtful. However, I couldn’t let this comment pass without observing that “biological female” is a scientific term, just as “fetus” is a scientific term. If I am forced to call an unborn baby a fetus to satisfy the draconian demands of the abortion-rights crowd, why must I abandon the correct terminology when it comes to adults who’ve “transitioned?” A person with a penis might be a trans woman, but he is most assuredly a biological male.

As you can imagine, this did not go over well, and the civil conversation remained civil until it ended, which was immediately. And I was left to wonder why we have to tiptoe gingerly around the trans issue, choosing our vocabulary as carefully as they’ve chosen their gender.

That Twitter conversation was a perfect example of why we find ourselves divided along social fault lines these days. If, like J.K. Rowling, you politely point out that while you may identify as one of any number of genders, biology still matters, you will be vilified. You will be erased from your own body of work and shunned by the nasty, ungrateful little actors who exist only because of your imagination. If you tell the truth, you will be sent to the social media stake.

What’s worse, you will be an example to those who might agree with you but who tremble in fear at the possibility that they, too, will be shunned. When the biological male who used to swim for the University of Pennsylvania’s varsity men’s team decided to become the biological male who swam for Penn’s varsity women’s team, no one was supposed to notice. We were all supposed to pretend that this fellow who had spent almost two decades living in a male body and enjoying the physiological benefits of testosterone was actually a woman. Actually, not just a woman. A woman who broke swimming records.

Fortunately, either out of anger, indignation, self preservation or a combination of all three, some of the biological women on the team spoke up to complain. The problem is, most of them remained anonymous, precisely because they knew the type of backlash they’d suffer if they dared to tell the truth.

And what is that truth? It’s that you cannot become a “woman” simply because your mind is not in sync with your genitals. You cannot become a “man” simply out of magical thinking, and the quasi-support of those who’ve been intimidated into silence. You can be a trans person, and you deserve respect, but you cannot command that we suspend belief or ignore the biological realities.

I’m getting a little tired of having to throw my years of training in logic and critical thinking down the drain just so I don’t get destroyed on social media, receive death threats or look like a meanie to old friends. If that’s the price I need to pay in order to get along in today’s society, count me and all of my pronouns out.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Another Christmas has come and gone. Once again we got excited about the glittering decorations and the music and the Santa cookies. But you know, the holiday is not very woke.

I mean, why is Mrs. Claus stuck at home while Santa gets the attention and the world tour?  Why do we only see Gingerbread “Men” and who decided that Christmas was, um, “white?”  So because we’ve evolved to the point where in order not to hurt anyone, we lie, I’ve re-examined these beloved classics through an evolved lens, to convince myself how wrong I’ve been over the past six decades.

FROSTY THE SNOWMAN

Have you ever wondered who decided Frosty was a man?  Was he assigned “male” at birth as a tiny little snowball? Did the fact that he indeed, had tiny little snowballs convince the doctor to declare him a melting baby boy?  If so, that is terribly backwards.  We should all understand that perhaps this snowperson never fully identified as a man. Perhaps we should simply allow Frosty to tell us who “they” are, and live “their” truest identity in the forest.  Because really, do puddles have an exact gender?

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS

I think every single one of us was deeply moved by Charlie Brown’s attempt to find beauty in that ugly little tree.  Seeing him walk through the forest, ignoring all of those amazing creations and head directly toward that abandoned little orphan sapling was incredibly moving. But after I watched as women found their voices over these past few years, I realized I’ve been supporting a man (okay, a 5-year-old boy) who had no respect whatsoever for females. Lucy specifically told Charlie to find a nice, big, shiny, flashy tree. Lucy was smart, she understood the whole thing about Christmas.  She was a great businesswoman.  This is the lady who said, “Look, Charlie, let’s face it. We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a big eastern syndicate, you know.”  And what did Charlie do?  That chauvinist white male, he ignored her.  He got the tree he wanted.  He showed her that her opinion didn’t matter at all. Complete and utter disrespect for her mind, her judgment and her desire.  And then, he essentially forces her to compliment him at the end by agreeing the pathetic little tree he picked wasn’t all that bad.  Typical male.

THE GRINCH WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS

Honestly, the Grinch, who is probably the first asexual non-binary character in children’s literature (unless you count Humpty Dumpty, but this is a Christmas column) was always considered to be a noble person because after stealing all of those things that didn’t belong to him, including the roast beast, he gave it all back. He did it because his heart enlarged three sizes “that day,” which might mean he had an adverse reaction to the vaccine, but that’s another column.  But what if he hadn’t given it all back? What if he’d decided to keep everything, because he deserved it. He was a victim of society, and he deserved to have these things that didn’t belong to him. I thought of this as I watched the poor people in California breaking into high-end boutiques and stealing things that also didn’t belong to them, things they so desperately needed like Hermes scarves, Prada bags, gold jewelry and leather boots. These people, like the Grinch, had been left behind and forgotten, disrespected and discriminated against because of their color (Black, not green, but whatever). And so they had a right to steal these things, dammit!  Which made me wonder why the Grinch had returned everything.  He should have held on to the snoofs, and the tringlers, the fuzzles and the pantookas, the daffler and the wuzzles. He could have gotten great resale value for them on the street.  I mean, haven’t they heard of criminal justice reform in Whoville?

THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL

This story always made me cry, knowing that this poor little girl was going to die of cold and hunger on Christmas Eve.  But as I replay it in my mind today, I wonder why she didn’t just rent an apartment and stiff the landlord on rent, because the guy who ran the Kingdom, Emperor Biden, wouldn’t have let the owner kick her out.  Problem solved.

If only I’d had the benefit of a woke education when I was a child, I wouldn’t have been suckered into believing that Frosty was a man, Charlie was compassionate, the Grinch was righteous and the Little Match Girl was doomed.  I would have understood that the real fairy tales are taking place right now, in 2021.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I regularly deal with women who’ve been sexually abused in other countries. Many of them do not report the assaults to law enforcement, because in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the police are unlikely to take rape and harassment seriously. These are generally patriarchal societies, where women are still considered property. There might be laws on the books, but they’re rarely applied.

But if you live in the United States, where we have a female vice president, a female speaker of the House, thousands of female judges at the state and federal level, it’s a little harder to understand why a woman who says she’s been attacked would wait years or even decades before making her accusations.

I call it CBFT, short for “Christine Blasey Ford Time.” Dr. Ford was the woman who famously accused Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her way back in the 1980s at a high school party. She didn’t just wait years. She waited almost four decades to tell what she believed to be her truth, and a troubling number of people (not just women) found no problem with the fact that she’d waited half a lifetime to come clean.

This week, two women who had either worked with or traveled in the same circles as actor Chris Noth, the famous Mike Logan of “Law and Order” and the even more famous Mr. Big of “Sex and the City,” accused him of assaulting them on two different occasions. Like many of the women who accused Bill Cosby of similar acts, the women did not know each other and their accusations were lodged months apart. To be honest, they seem pretty credible.

But they occurred in, respectively, 2004 and 2015. The legal statute of limitations is long past. They know that, and we know that, and there is very little likelihood of any criminal charges being brought against Noth. There is no legal or ethical twist as there was in the Cosby situation. And unlike Blasey Ford and Anita Hill before her, these women are not trying to keep a man from being confirmed for a seat on the Supreme Court or some other high-profile job.

Nonetheless, what they are doing is equally dangerous, even though it doesn’t have the capacity to strip a man of his employment or worse, have him locked up as an octogenarian based on hearsay evidence and a complete manipulation of privacy protections and civil depositions.

They are launching fire bombs against a person who is being asked when he stopped beating his wife. He will, like former Secretary of Labor Ray Donovan, be forced to search for that office where he can get his reputation back. He is losing, as Shakespeare wrote in the person of Cassio “the immortal part of myself, and all the rest is bestial.” In fact, by calling Chris Noth a sexual beast, his accusers have had him tried, convicted and sentenced in that quicksilver span of time known as a “trending topic” on social media.

I don’t care what happens to Noth. In fact, up until this week’s revelations, the only time I thought of him was when I watched the endlessly looping reruns of “Law and Order,” seasons 1-5 (the only ones worth watching, in my opinion.) I’m 60, he’s older, and that’s about it.

But even forgettable cads have a right not to have their reputations trashed by women who emerge from the shadows like avenging handmaids, wanting to tell their stories of woe to strangers. It’s not enough that they might have spoken to friends about their alleged ordeals the morning after. And they certainly know they can’t get any legal redress at this late stage. They don’t seem to want celebrity, because many of them hide their identities.

The only thing I can think is that they see this shining bandwagon in the distance, chugging along the social justice highway, and they want to jump on. They want to make sure men with bad attitudes are publicly shamed because for so very long, they weren’t. They want to shift the societal axis toward what they believe to be payback for women, but which I am certain they would call justice. But it’s not justice, because all they will be getting is some after-the-fact affirmation that they were wronged.

Men who rape and sexually assault women need to be held accountable. The way to do that is to actually hold them accountable when they commit the acts, not years later when they won’t be prosecuted.

We already have Eastern Standard and Daylight Savings Time. We need to get rid of Christine Blasey Ford Time.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Politics inevitably seeps into any discussion of crime and punishment, of justice, of anger at the system, and of desperation. We have seen that over and over again, including last week when the former mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter got into a war of words with the current district attorney, Larry Krasner.

As anticipated, it was even uglier than the actual crime statistics.

Krasner launched the first bomb by making the tragicomic observation that “we don’t have a crisis of crime” in the city that recently re-elected him to the position of chief law enforcement officer. It’s possible he really believes what he’s saying, given that his philosophy has always been to look at the victimizers and not the victims. As a lifelong defense attorney, Krasner is conditioned to empathize with the guy with the gun, not the guy with the bullet in his chest. You can’t blame a fellow for acting like Pavlov’s dog, salivating whenever someone screams “social justice matters” over the bleeding body of an innocent victim.

We had a great opportunity for someone who actually does care about the bloodshed and violence to weigh in and speak truth to mediocrity, and Nutter stepped up to the plate. At least, it looked as if he did. When I heard the former mayor had actually “criticized” Krasner and demanded an apology on behalf of the over 500 families of homicide victims, I cheered.

But then I actually paid closer attention to what Nutter said, and was appalled. Instead of seeking unity and solidarity, instead of acknowledging the humanity of innocent victims, Nutter picked the lowest-hanging fruit: Race. He immediately played that card, talking about how Krasner’s comments were a manifestation of “white privilege.”

In a now widely read essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Nutter wrote that “It takes a certain audacity of ignorance and white privilege to say [that there is no crisis of crime] right now. As of Monday night, 521 people, souls, spirits have been vanquished, eliminated, murdered in our City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection, the most since 1960. I have to wonder what kind of messed up world of white wokeness Krasner is living in to have so little regard for human lives lost, many of them Black and brown, while he advances his own national profile as a progressive district attorney.”

Some of my friends, virtually all of them conservative, want to give Nutter a pass for focusing the lens on minority deaths. They are so desperate for any recognition from the left that the policies of Krasner and like-minded prosecutors are so toxic that even crumbs will suffice. It’s the old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” theory.

I get that, and I empathize with them, but it’s not enough, not by a long shot. This is why I’ve always been opposed to hate crime legislation. When you start valuing lives based on irrelevancies like gender, race, ethnicity and other things over which we have no control (including gender, even though that’s another column altogether) you lose sight of the innate humanity of the victim.

To say that we should be particularly sensitive to the crime rate because it is Black and brown lives that are being lost disproportionately relegates the deaths of people like Sam Collington, Milan Loncar and Gerald Grandzol, all victims of shootings in Philadelphia. Their shooters were people of color. They were white. Does that matter? No. Should it matter? No. Are 500 deaths more important than three, or 30, or 300? No, not to their families and not to a society that cares about the “content of our character.”

So why did Nutter have to go and focus his lament and anger on the Black and brown communities to make his point?

A reader once wrote to me that I am “tone deaf” to the “social reckoning” that is taking place in this country. She had no idea how happy her words made me, and would have been horrified to learn of their impact. I am both tone deaf and color blind to the racial differences of dead bodies, as all of us should be. Once, that would have been considered a virtue, but now we’re supposed to place certain deaths and certain statistics into special, separate categories.

Michael Nutter had an opportunity to speak to everyone impacted by violence and whose lives have been touched, even tangentially, by crime and its attendant loss.

That he chose not to is an example of how we really have no damn idea about what lives matter. Until all of them do, none of them should.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Lately, I’ve started seeing all the usual Christmas decorations, books, gift suggestions, articles, foods and complaints about all the usual Christmas decorations, books, gift suggestions, articles, and foods.

Some say they’re too over the top, some say it’s too early, and some say it’s not enough. I’m familiar with all of it, including the promises of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” with its haunting Vince Guaraldi score, the proliferation of Dickensian memorabilia and the magical, incandescent beauty of the late autumn, early winter daylight. It really is the most wonderful time of the year.

But the one thing I can’t snuggle up to is that Elf on the Shelf. As a child of the 1960s and 1970s, I had no idea that it was actually a “thing,” until I started seeing that grinning little imp showing up in all of my Facebook feeds.

The thing that bothered me the most is this elf looked “aware.” He had an expression that reminded me of the doll in that “Twilight Zone’ episode with Telly Zavalas, the one where she gets her revenge by “accidentally” showing up on the staircase and sending him hurtling to his death.

I did a little research and found out that the whole thing stems from a book that was published in 2004, authored by a mother-daughter team. Apparently, this elf is supposed to be Santa’s eyes. It moves around the house around Christmastime, reminding little kids that they need to be good, otherwise Santa’s secret Stasi doll is going to take names and convey them to the central authorities.

I know that you might be saying, well, what about that song “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” where the most chilling passage is “He sees you when you’re sleeping/He knows when you’re awake/He knows if you’ve been bad or good/So be good for goodness sake.”

The difference is that in the song, it’s Santa who’s watching, not some pointy-toed little henchman. Santa is benign, and he’s the one making the toys and delivering the gifts so you kind of understand why he’d want to make sure that he’s not being overly generous to brats.

Having grown up during the Cold War and spending the first 30 years of my life with the shadow of the Iron Curtain just a continent away (particularly since we had relatives in Italy who literally were next door to Yugoslavia which was the most western of the Soviet Bloc countries but still a communist state), I got the whole principle of surveillance. It was a fact of life, and this was well before the Patriot Act became a homemade reality.

But we didn’t allow those things into our homes. Santa, if he was engaged in some covert operation, could be forgiven because he was a benign fellow who would probably still give you some toys even if you (as I) screwed around with your younger siblings because they really deserved it.

That elf is different. That elf is not bringing you toys. That elf is not someone with whom you could have a lifelong relationship. That elf is a poorly-dressed, miniature spy who came in from the cold and is going back there, along with any intel that he gathered about you biting the plastic heads off of your brothers’ green plastic army men (not that I know anyone who actually did that, mind you).

In short, that elf has no place in any home where children are considered beloved creatures and not comrades living under the yoke of parental oppression. Christmas is a time of cheer, not a time to peer, and I’m personally offended that this thing is now considered a beloved tradition by generations that didn’t think Charlie Brown, Rudolph or even that melting snowman were enough.

I suppose you could call me a bitter old lady who doesn’t understand that times change and that the Grinch of my youth was a heresy to my parents and grandparents, who had their own simpler traditions. But I really think that something has broken a little with this elf, this hostile little creature who exists to mandate compliance. It’s “you better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout or we’ll send you to the gulag, that’s why.”

Then again, I might just have seen too many episodes of “The Twilight Zone.”

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].