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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

There’s No Simple Plan For Your Life

Jennifer James The Spokesman-Rev

“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner!”

Colette, French novelist

Dear Ms. James, I am working on a project to compile a list of things a person can do to live a simple life with less stress. I’d be delighted to hear your ideas. - Mark.

Dear Mark, I haven’t been able to live a simple life or even define it. I was raised on a farm and I love animals, plants and ponds. I work with ideas and emotions so I love books and art and the colors that light makes when it moves through glass. I live a kaleidoscope life.

There are books, columns and experts on simplicity available for you. All I can offer is that humor, balance, integrity and kindness are the keys for a stress-free life. Laugh at virtually everything. However busy you choose to be, keep your life in balance. Remember to rest and evaluate. Know who you are and what your values are and hold them as the center of your life regardless of what people or events challenge you. Treat everyone with kindness, even in conflict. Love does comes in simple ways, but life may be complex and still be wonderful.

- Jennifer

Dear Jennifer, Angry white men cannot deal with the idea of people of color being equal partners with them. They seek to maintain an integration of unequals world wide. Affirmative action is not a solution, it is a band-aid to the unfair practices of discrimination.

People of color and white women do not really want affirmative action. They want discrimination removed from the economy. However, since white men refuse to end discrimination, others must reluctantly make do with affirmative action.

People argue that they should not pay for the discrimination done by past generations. This argument promotes irresponsibility. The discrimination is ongoing, and white men willingly enjoy the privileges that past and present discrimination gives them, yet they refuse to take responsibility for the past or the present.

White men need to learn that they have an allotted number of seats at the table of world politics that is in proportion to their population. No race is a master one, and no race is inherently a slave one. If there is to be peace on earth, there must be an integration of equal partners. - K.P.

Dear K.P.: The Southern Baptist Convention, born of a north-south split over slavery in 1845, recently passed a resolution apologizing for its pro-slave-owner roots and repenting lingering racism and conscious or unconscious discrimination.

The Los Angeles Times cites this event as the “latest mass expression of regret and repentance so far in a wave of contrition for historical wrongs voiced by religious leaders.” The Pope, the evangelical Lutherans and many other religious groups are doing the same.

They have given up rationalizations, diatribes about 1995 “justice” and anger for what the Southern Baptists state is a necessary step to reduce the continuing “bitter harvest” of the past.

I am worn out with the anger and the hypocrisy of the racial and ethnic debate in America. We will continue to drag it with us into the future unless we are willing to face our history and our conduct and all take responsibility.

- Jennifer

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