The Sentry (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) (Members Blog)

We are mourning the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg who for 27 years sat on the United States Supreme Court. Her impact in writing, affirming and advocating primarily the rights of women in a fractious and increasingly conservative judicial arena gave her various monikers, the Notorious B.E.G. is one that I have found to be the most illuminating and endearing, an unlikely “street” moniker for a scholar, a jurist and a lady in every respect.

I will leave you to read about her illustrious career and struggle with cancer in other places. This is a note of commemoration for a public hero of which we have far too few in this decade of our America.

The holder of not only ideas, Justice Ginsburg fashioned the trajectory of theory against which to make judgments at the High Court level to hold people accountable as well as to retread laws and review actions which bound women’s interests against their own fundamental rights. She consistently applied the measuring rod: what does this mean for and in the lives of women?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a sentry at the judicial gate. Sometimes it was a lonely vigil, but she stood at attention in her solitary role, ever vigilant, on duty until the last light left her eyes.

Muriel Tillinghast,
Co-Chair Lucy’s Children*
(Named for the Australopithecus “Lucy” discovered in 1974 by the Johanson Team in Ethiopia, East Africa)

America Not at its Greatest (Members’ Blog)

Note: This is a statement of solidarity with and for the current public responses to the police murder of George Floyd, late of Minneapolis, Minnesota by the Ethical Action Committee of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture.

Today, millions of people around the world are on the brink of new thinking. New information is decimating old values and generating different perspectives about how we as Americans should live with each other. Having one’s life in the hands of sadistic, uniformed, gun-toting authorities is an impossible situation to negotiate especially when down on the ground, cuffed with someone’s knee on the throat. People are speaking out, calling for accountability by the police and their handlers — those at the top of civil authority — to change their MO (modus operandi), their way of conducting themselves in all quarters and at all times. Demonstrators are calling out to all federal, state, county, and city policing authorities. This is a national issue affecting police work on the street that we can see to the work in precincts and in jails and prison where we cannot see.

Now for those who didn’t know before, this treatment is a blueprint of the behaviors to which Blacks were subject in slavery. With help from our racial and class allies, these pro-Floyd responses have the momentum to be the catalyst to writing the next chapter in American life. Such improvement requires significant changes inclusive of having infrastructures in place with open channels ensuring increased inclusion of Black people through the American economy. Improving the police means permanently weeding out those with temperaments and attitudes of rabidity. Better policing will require fundamentally the revamping and reorientation of those in uniform, not just in rhetoric, but in behaviors and policy with heavy accountability for misconduct.