Brooklyn's Finntown has Officially Died

Back in the 1970's, my aunt enrolled in a Brooklyn driving school.

A New York City native, and living fairly close to a subway stop, she technically didn't need to drive, but being an independent woman, she figured having a drivers license provides a measure of independence.

Half-way through her first drive with an instructor, she was so exasperated by the experience, she pulled the car over, in the middle of Brooklyn traffic, put it in park, got out, and stalked home - on foot.

I'm sure the instructor was as relieved about my aunt's decision as she was.

Helena Laitinen, in 1986

My aunt, Helena, passed away yesterday at a memory care facility in Florida, never having gotten a driver's license.

My aunt never married, never had children, never earned a lot of money, and never was what I would call "happy."  Contentedness proved elusive for her.  Yet she had many friends, could be extremely generous, and was loyal to the point of obsession.

A century ago, her childhood neighborhood in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, was America's center of Finnish culture.  It was called Finntown, but the number of Finns in Sunset Park was never more than 10,000, which isn't large by New York City's ethnic standards.  New York's Finns tended to be clannish, living within several blocks of the picturesque city park with stunning views of the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan. 

There were at least three Finnish churches; Lutheran, Congregational, and Pentecostal.  They had a large social hall called Imatra, built in 1908; a rambling, rickety wood structure notable for being the first public building in the neighborhood with its own electricity, provided by an on-site generator.  At first Imatra did not allow liquor, but by the time I visited it in the late 80's, about the only thing people frequented in it was its bar.  Yeah, Finns are known for their prodigious consumption of alcohol, and they had several bars in the neighborhood.  And a newspaper, New Yorkin Uutiset, for which Helena's father often wrote short stories.  In Finnish, of course.

My grandfather was one of those Finns who loved his liquor.  In fact, he was one of Finntown's biggest boozers, squandering on alcohol whatever money he and my grandmother, a cleaning lady, earned.  Family life for Helena and my father was utter misery.  The horror of having that kind of person as a father and male figurehead in her family deeply scarred my aunt against the male gender, and I heard her comment frequently about how much she generally disdained men.  That's one reason why she never married.  She was going to prove with her life that she could be happy without a husband.

And she found some solace in hard work, for which even that purportedly egalitarian bastion of capitalism, cosmopolitan Manhattan, was supposed to reward employees regardless of gender.  Yet Helena constantly fought the economic stigma of being the clerk, the secretary, the editor, the legal assistant.  Even when she worked for a powerful female attorney at a prestigious Midtown law firm, just off Park Avenue, both the female attorney and my aunt would commiserate about how both of them didn't receive the same pay for their efforts as men in the same positions.  And Helena's boss would know - her husband was also an attorney, and she knew how much more he earned than she did.

(At least Helena's boss and her husband could mourn how much less female attorneys earn in Manhattan while enjoying their sprawling Central Park West apartment, Pennsylvania country house, and live-in nanny.)

My grandmother, Matilda, and Helena
celebrating my aunt's birthday in the 1950s
at a friend's home on 43rd St. in Finntown

Despite being good at the jobs she held over the years, however much she was paid, Helena's main identity came from her native Finntown, even while the neighborhood changed completely during her lifetime.  As white flight surged through New York after World War II, Helena and her mother, my grandmother, remained committed to Finntown.  When they pooled their money to purchase a better home than what they'd endured during the worst of my grandfather's inebriation, they didn't move out to the suburbs like their Finnish friends were doing.  No, they moved to a bigger apartment one block up the street - the same street on which Helena ended up living about 98% of her 88 years.

My grandfather died before my parents ever met.  An apparent heart attack killed him in the foyer of their new apartment.  My grandmother got home from work first, then Helena.  Then my Dad, who said he literally had to step over his father's corpse to get inside the apartment and close the door.  For quite a while, the three of them stood, silent, looking at the lifeless body of one of Finntown's most incorrigible boozers.  They were relieved, mostly.  Finally, my Dad said aloud, "I guess we need to call somebody to take him away?"

For my aunt, my grandfather's death provided a sort of freedom, but she couldn't escape the shadows and demons with which he'd tortured his family in that neighborhood.  Some people would flee the place where so much pain had been inflicted upon them.  But not Helena.  As much as she loved Finntown culturally, I think the main reason she stayed was so she could somehow try to redeem her awful childhood as the tall, angst-ridden daughter of a hardened alcoholic.

A few years later, my parents got married and set up housekeeping in a much better Brooklyn neighborhood until I was born. Then Dad was transferred Upstate, and we left the city. Mom and Dad spent years trying to cajole Helena and my grandmother to at least move to a better neighborhood, especially since the thought of suburbia made them blanch. 

Mom came to believe that my grandmother was willing to move, but she didn't want to leave Helena.  And Helena was adamant about staying, even as the neighborhood was disintegrating before their very eyes.  Crime became rampant, buildings became vacant, hoodlums moved in, stores on the avenues closed.  Vandalism exploded, and graffiti was everywhere.  The streets were dangerous, even in broad daylight.

One of Helena's single girlfriends moved to Virginia and raved about how beautiful and safe it was.  "Come to Virginia," her friend nagged Helena.  Others were nagging from New Jersey, Long Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Florida.  Even Staten Island.  But no, Helena and my grandmother would insist:  All the Finns can't abandon Finntown.  Things would improve any day in Sunset Park.

Unfortunately, things went from bad to worse.

I remember one afternoon when we were visiting Helena and my grandmother, and other friends were also in their third-floor apartment, when suddenly, shots rang out down the block.  We all fell to the floor, except my elderly grandmother, who after years of scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, could no longer get down on her hands and knees.  The gunshots kept coming, and police car sirens screamed and whooped.  Before long, the entire block was full of cop cars, people shouting; pandemonium.  My grandmother sat in her chair, looking at all of us on the floor, listening to the shoot-out outside, her face in her hands, laughing with embarrassment at the absurdity of it all.

Then the church which Helena had faithfully attended since she was born closed. Its pastor and his wife, dear friends of Helena and our family, moved to Florida to minister to the legions of Brooklyn Finns who'd resettled down in the Lake Worth, West Palm Beach, and Boynton Beach area.  It seemed as if all of my family's friends were encouraging Helena and my grandmother to escape Sunset Park while they still could.  But they didn't.

One day, while at her job in Manhattan, my aunt received a call from the police back in Brooklyn.  Apparently a gunshot had gone through the living room window of their apartment, and would she come home to let the cops inside, so they could retrieve the bullet for their investigation?

I remember Helena found particular encouragement in the fact that, while the city was going to you-know-what-in-a-handbasket, the police still wanted to follow up on that one bullet.  See?  Things can't be all that bad, right?

Up the block, in Sunset Park itself, thugs literally bombed the Olympic-sized swimming pool, and the cash-starved city left it in shambles for years, unable to fix it.  Mass transit, upon which my aunt and grandmother relied almost exclusively, since Helena refused to get a drivers license, became ridiculously dangerous, dirty, and unreliable.  Yet they stayed put.

Things got so bad, when my grandmother had an aneurysm and fell backwards down a flight of stairs in their apartment building, it took Helena about half an hour, frantically scanning the yellow pages, to find an ambulance company willing to enter their neighborhood after dark, before the days of 9-1-1.

After my grandmother's death, we again tried to convince Helena to at least move to a better neighborhood in the city, if she didn't want to leave it entirely.  Yet she refused.  She had plenty of excuses:  Sunset Park was so crime-ridden, she couldn't get anything if she tried to sell her apartment.  If she left Finntown, who'd be left to carry on the Finnishness of the place?  Anyplace else, she'd have to learn to drive, and she didn't want to try that again.  Things had to get better; how much worse could they get? 

But it wasn't optimism that fueled her determination to say.  I believe it was an overwhelming urge to somehow redeem her awful childhood.

Thankfully, Helena was never mugged, raped, or even physically threatened.  Her apartment was never burglarized.  As one of the few white women left in the neighborhood, and an exceptionally tall one at that, I think Helena came to relish her distinguishing presence on the sidewalks, the bus, and at the subway station.  She came to represent resistance, and tenacity despite the neighborhood's stunning decline.  She had grit, she was strong, and she wasn't going to let a bunch of punks and welfare cheats drive her from her home.

And it certainly seemed like there were a lot of welfare cheats.  Young men sat on brownstone stoops all day long, ogling their personal luxury cars parked at the curb, obtained through no legal means.  When Helena went shopping at the only grocery store left in the neighborhood - a filthy den of rotting produce and past-sell-by-date staples - she was often the only customer not paying with food stamps.  Or purchasing copious amounts of beer and cigarettes.

She'd yell at the neighbors on her block who were doing and selling drugs.  She wasn't scared of the dealers; she was indignant towards them.  She'd scream out her third-floor windows at Latinos playing their salsa music too loudly.  She'd walk up to parents on the sidewalk whose kids were using foul language, and she'd angrily critique their lax parenting.  Sure, some of the newbies in the 'hood who grew accustomed to Helena's rants would curse her to her face, but it only fueled her defiance.

And plenty more people pretty much left her alone.

Indeed, except for some chatty neighbors in her apartment building, my aunt was soon very alone in her neighborhood.  She'd visit dear friends who'd moved elsewhere in Brooklyn, and she had her work in Manhattan, but on her block, she was the last holdout.  The last Finn.  A few elderly Finns remained scattered around the old Finntown, but the good old days when Finns didn't need to speak or write any English to flourish in the neighborhood were long gone.

As best as I know, today, there are approximately five - maybe eight - Finns left in Sunset Park and the original Finntown.  Down from 10,000 at their peak.  The handful who remain keep to themselves, and were never as involved in New York's Finnish cultural community as Helena was.  They live on 41st Street, between 7th and 8th avenues, across the street from a revitalized Sunset Park, and amidst a boom of Chinese immigrants that has driven housing prices through the roof.  Indeed, Helena enjoyed a bit of validation for her years of holding out, as the Chinese practically invaded the crumbling shell of her neighborhood, beginning in the 1990's.  Storefronts that had been empty for decades were re-opened.  Restaurants moved in.  Decrepit vacant buildings were torn down and shiny, modernistic, ugly new ones - tall ones! - were erected in their place. 

On Helena's block, the Chinese crammed into every house, even living in illegal basement apartments.  Helena would stand at her third-floor windows every morning, marveling at the swarms of Chinese who would emerge from every doorway and march towards the subway station.  That many people hadn't gone to work on her block in a generation.  She was pleased to see such industriousness, even though she knew that many of those poor souls were in Brooklyn illegally, having sold themselves to human traffickers who were literally holding each of them for tens of thousands of dollars in ransom.  Money Helena's new neighbors faced years of repaying, many working long hours in virtually sweatshop conditions.

When she began to develop dementia several years ago, my family finally convinced her to move to a retirement center in Florida.  She sold her 700-square-foot apartment for $300,000, a staggering sum for her, but still a pittance compared with similar apartments in far better neighborhoods in trendier parts of the city (and not quite half what similar apartments are selling for today, just a few years later).

Her death yesterday represents dementia's continued toll on my family, after my Dad's passing from Alzheimer's last fall.  Thinking back on all of the friendships both Dad and Helena maintained from their childhood days, growing up in Brooklyn, nearly all of those friends have died from some sort of memory-related illness as well.

One of the responsibilities Helena assumed for herself back in the old Finntown was being a nurse for older Finns who had remained, like her.  And in Florida, as her mind was taken from her, Helena was visited by younger friends who'd long ago moved from Finntown to Florida.  It wasn't the most ideal set-up; we'd asked Helena if she wanted to relocate closer to family in Michigan or Texas, but she chose Florida, because that's where most of her Finntown friends were now.

Throughout her entire life, Helena obsessed over her Finnish roots far more than the rest of us in her small family have.  But it wasn't just her Finnish roots that gave Helena her identity.  She seemed driven by a desire to re-craft for herself a life that could suffocate all of those painful childhood years as the daughter of a Finnish alcoholic.

Sunset Park's dismal decay during the worst years of New York City's urban blight couldn't shift Helena's focus.  The crime, the graffiti, the stolen, stripped cars junked on the avenues, the empty stores, the vandalized subway stations couldn't force her to abandon an intention I doubt she herself fully understood.  It was as if she'd already become hardened to the hardness of life in a ghetto.  She saw what was happening, but instead of making her flee, it made her more fierce in her resolve to fight.

Was it foolishness on her part?  Some would say it was.  Was it unrealistic?  Without knowing if Helena really knew why she refused to move away, it's hard to tell if she found any measure of peace by staying.  It certainly never looked to the rest of us like she did.

Of one thing we can be certain, however:  My aunt hated giving up.  Yes, she gave up on driving - car, instructor, and all.  But that was about it.

Yesterday evening, as her caregivers were putting her to bed, she stopped breathing, and one of them gently jostled her.  "Helena!"  She called out in alarm, "You've stopped breathing!"

Reportedly, Helena's eyes briefly opened, and she shot the caregiver one of her trademark cold, hard glares.  And then she closed her eyes, and softly took one final breath.

She always did like having the last word.

Doesn't Individual Agency Still Matter?

Have you heard about it yet?

It's the new non-fiction book by J.D. Vance about why poor white people seem disproportionately enamored by Donald Trump's candidacy for president.  Entitled Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, it's become an instant best-seller and a topic of conversation across several prominent conservative websites.

And while I haven't read the book, I'm struck by how it helps to represent the eagerness with which a certain segment of American conservatism is trying to figure out the hold somebody like Trump has secured across a vast stretch of of a mostly white, mostly less educated, mostly poorer cross-section of the electorate.

And it's not just the legions of faceless, nameless middle Americans who are gushing over Trump.  Evangelical blue-chips like Focus on the Family's James Dobson are eroding their credibility by championing the billionaire developer.  They're twisting Scripture and invoking platitudes about a religious Americanism that brazenly defy orthodox theology.  Churchgoers across the country are lapping it up, fretting amongst themselves about what is going to happen to our country if people don't overlook Trump's glaring flaws and vote for him anyway.  And people like me who are voting third party this year?  Many conservatives who've reluctantly decided for Trump say we're throwing away our vote, and saying we're part of the Hillary problem.

Actually, if Democrats weren't so busy fighting amongst themselves, they would see that all of this hand-wringing by Republicans actually spells deeper trouble for Hillary than whether or not the Russians helped expose the DNC's obstructionism towards Bernie Sanders.  These past eight years have not been kind to this country socially and economically.  More single women are raising families than ever before.  Wages for all but the One Percenters have been stagnant.  Even with a black man in the White House, racism seems worse now than when the Obamas first moved onto Pennsylvania Avenue.  The wars started by George Bush and his neo-cons have spiraled out of control and out across the Middle East like Whirling Dervishes.  Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize - of all things - at the start of his presidency, Obama has instead presided over an incessant drumbeat of terrorism and bloodshed.

People are afraid.  Americans are watching their paychecks purchase less and less, and we're watching Europe being bombed by disgruntled Muslims.  Our government is currently fixated on existential topics such as men using the women's restroom, while voters want to see genuine progress on bread-and-butter issues such as the economy and national security.  It doesn't matter that Trump has no concrete plans for how he's going to strategically and effectively address the problems he clearly can identify.  Shucks, we all know what the problems are.  Yet both Trump and Hillary seem more preoccupied with name recognition than policy creation.

Which is where Vance, the author, chimes in.

One of the reasons Vance says he wrote his book is to provide a bit of a kick to the American electorate's rear end.  In one of the more provocative interviews he's given during his book's publicity tour, Vance is asked by TheAmericanConservative.com's Rod Dreher if voters will even tolerate being told that many of their problems aren't the fault of their own government:

"We’re no longer a country that believes in human [individual]agency... To hear Trump or Clinton talk about the poor, one would draw the conclusion that they have no power to affect their own lives.  Things have been done to them, from bad trade deals to Chinese labor competition, and they need help.  And without that help, they’re doomed to lives of misery they didn’t choose."

In other words, our elections have turned into one big "look what you've done against me" and "what can you do for me?" parody of self-reliance that actually perpetuates the notion that, contrary to what many conservatives say they believe, the government holds the key to a better life.

So we get really afraid when we consider that people like Hillary could be at the helm of the entity that supposedly influences our lives the most.  And that fear makes people like Trump practically salvific in terms of his audacity to suggest that, first, America is a decrepit morass of dysfunction (which, as the world's largest economy, we're obviously not - yet, anyway); and second, that all it will take is one loud-mouth CEO to build walls and renegotiate contracts, diplomacy and civil rights be damned.

Of course, other countries have had leaders like that in the past, and what usually ends up happening is some sort of upheaval, when the ordinary people realize that their individual liberties have become diluted by the person they hoped would do the opposite.

When it comes to the concept of "individual agency," that scenario is what our elections are supposed to help us avoid.

(That's another reason I'm voting Third Party.)

Spot On: Seeing Eyewear as Safety Gear

A freak thing.

After learning that stormy winds blew a panel of wood from a Manhattan construction site onto a passerby yesterday, I was reminded of my own similar brush with construction danger on Gotham's busy sidewalks.

Yesterday's victim, an older man, was hit in the head by the falling wood, and taken to the hospital in critical condition.  It could have happened to anybody walking by.  Just another unsettling reality of big city life.

There's an old joke that New York will be a great city - once it ever gets finished!  And sure enough, with construction sites a ubiquitous part of New York City's experience, most New Yorkers walk past work zones with barely a thought to them.  And considering the many ways pedestrians could become injured by all of the dangers of high-rise construction, whether it's a remodel or a brand-new project, perhaps the only surprise is that more passersby don't suffer a similar mishap as yesterday's.

Mine took place in the early 1990's, when I lived on East 28th Street, and was a regular commuter along the Lexington Avenue 4-5-6 line, which has a local stop at 28th Street and Park Avenue South (a far less prestigious stretch of that famous boulevard).  At the time, there was an old building on the northwest corner of the intersection that was being remodeled in some way, with scaffolding around parts of it, and one of those rickety pedestrian "tunnels" along the sidewalks.

It was a blustery morning, I recall, and I was approaching the subway entrance from the east, along with dozens of other people.  At the intersection, waiting for the light to change, I was looking up, enjoying the bright blue sky, and a small dot of water landed on one of the lenses of my glasses.

Living in New York, having droplets of water hit my glasses was a common occurrence for me, especially in the summers.  Air conditioners, from small window units sticking out of buildings, to those massive machines on skyscraper rooftops, regularly spit their condensation all over the place.  It's not that big of a deal, and frankly, the water created by those units would be far cleaner than what might be in your beverage glass at your neighborhood diner.

At least, I thought this was water.  I remember crossing the street to reach the subway station's Downtown platform, with the breeze whipping around; descending the dank stairwell to the underground platform, with the customary rush of wind coming up the stairwell as express trains blew through the station.  And as I stood waiting for my train, the dot of water was still on my glasses.

Odd, I thought.  With all of the air that's been blown over my glasses, this spot of water should have dried by now, and become invisible.  But I didn't take my glasses off to inspect them; Manhattan subway platforms during rush hour congestion aren't the best place to take off one's glasses and hold them up to the light.

So I rode down to my usual stop, got my toasted sesame bagel "with a schmear" (of cream cheese), walked down to my office building, and got to the 25th floor... and the dot was still on my glasses.

When I reached my desk, the first thing I did was take off my glasses, and wouldn't you know it?!  It wasn't a dot of water on my plastic lens after all.  It was a small hole!

Whatever liquid had landed on my glasses back up at 28th Street wasn't water, but some sort of corrosive chemical that burned a hole half-way through the plastic lens of my glasses!

My co-workers, most of them native New Yorkers, were only mildly interested in my discovery.  I, on the other hand, was a bit more excited.  "What if this whatever-it-was hit my naked eyeball?"

Fortunately, the optician's shop where I'd purchased the glasses was located a few blocks away in the Financial District, so I quickly called them up, and they told me to come on over.  An optician examined the lens with one of those magnifying glasses like jewelers use, and he held both my glasses and the magnifier over for me to take a look as well.  The hole had burned itself almost clear through the lens.

"If that residue that flew onto your glasses had actually landed in your eye, you'd be at the hospital right now, not this eyeglass store," I remember him marveling.  It took a couple of days for them to re-make my one lens, at a cost I don't recall.

Suffice it to say, ever since that morning in Manhattan, I've never once seriously regretted having to wear glasses.  Over the years, as surgeries and lasers have become more sophisticated, and the need for glasses to correct vision problems has been drastically reduced, I take a moment and think back to how that pair of spectacles may have saved me from severe optical damage.  From a freak speck of some unknown corrosive chemical that was being carried along by Gotham's fickle wind.

People have suggested that I should have gone to that construction site on the corner and asked them what they were using that could have become airborne and damaged my glasses.  But since I couldn't prove the chemical actually came from that construction site, meaning the contractors there would care even less about my story than my co-workers did, I figured it wouldn't be worth it.

So, what's my point?  Isn't it clear?  Although glasses can be inconvenient - and even annoying, now that I have to wear bifocals - I know they can be worth the bother.

Indeed, for me, "four-eyes" has a distinctly comforting ring to it.  After all, it's better than "three-eyes."  Or "one-eye."

Then again, maybe having to wear an eye patch would make me look more enigmatic and rugged...

I can hear myself now:  "I don't always visit New York City.  But when I do, I wear my glasses."

Be Partial to Impartiality

Impartiality.

It's what Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg doesn't have when it comes to Donald Trump.

It's what Donald Trump doesn't have when it comes to Islam.  Or Mexico.  Or Hispanics in general.

It's what a lot of America's media doesn't have when it comes to peaceable coexistence between racial groups.

According to Merriam - Webster, being impartial means not being biased.  It means "treating or affecting all equally."

Yet can a professional judge - let alone a sitting justice on none other than the United States Supreme Court - consider herself impartial if she tells the New York Times that it would be better to move to New Zealand than endure a Donald Trump presidency?  Clarifying* her comments to CNN, apparently so we'd know she wasn't merely having a "senior moment," the octogenarian called Trump a "faker."

Should The Donald win the White House, and act on even a fraction of his bizarre policy notions, much of what he does likely will end up in the courts, and the Supreme Court may become quite busy deciding cases directly influenced by him.  Ginsburg even hints at such a possibility in her remarks to the Times.  So is she willing to recuse herself from those cases?

Because as a judge, she's supposed to be impartial.  And obviously, she's not, and she's proud of it.  Otherwise, why would an otherwise savvy and experienced justice say such things to such prominent media outlets?  Granted, she's also said some pretty biased things regarding her enthusiastic support of abortion, which obfuscates any impartiality she's supposed to have on the highly contested practice.

Trump, for his part, is now calling for her to resign.  But although even the Times - relishing its role in this latest presidential controversy - is also chiding Ginsburg for her bluntness, it's not exactly illegal for a Supreme Court justice to grant interviews or share personal opinions in a public forum, whether they're about a presidential candidate or abortion legislation.  It's not wise for any judge to do, but there's nothing forcing Ginsburg to resign.  Nevertheless, if Trump wins (or if the presidential election itself is contested), and business comes before the court involving Trump, legal experts are saying she's almost certainly going to have to recuse herself every time, because she won't be able to feign impartiality.

Of course, Trump has built a wildly unconventional presidential campaign on mocking the concept of impartiality.  Everybody knows he's partial to all sorts of things, from beautiful women to, ultimately, himself.  He's proudly biased against Muslims, anybody south of America's border with Mexico, and just about anybody else who disagrees with him.

His flaunting of hyper-partiality has won him legions of fans who view his brazen narcissism as a welcome respite from political correctness.  Because, after all, political correctness is actually phantom impartiality, isn't it?  At least the way most of its practitioners exercise it.  How impartial can "tolerance" be, when politically correct tolerance is partial to only a certain tolerated viewpoint, to the exclusion of opposing views?

Yet impartiality - not political correctness - still matters in politics, doesn't it?  Especially when it comes to the White House.  While any politician is going to be particularly beholden to a political platform, of course, a president generally is nevertheless expected to present a certain air of impartiality as the principle representative of our diverse nation.

After all, impartiality is key when it comes to the law, which is why Ginsburg is in such hot water.  A president needs to be able to at least conjure the image of justice advocacy when it comes to rationalizing why their policies are good for the country as a whole.  Or why we need to support our cops after five Dallas officers get slaughtered at the end of a racially-motivated march.  Or why the disenfranchised in our society shouldn't be.  Or that our tax codes shouldn't be riddled with loopholes that favor certain taxpayers more than others.

And speaking of that march in Dallas last week that ended so horrifically, consider this:  To what extent is America's media culpable in fomenting an atmosphere of angst and frustration based on appearances, rather than impartial facts?  The media has long ago abandoned any pretense of being impartial, whether it's liberal outlets like the Times and the Washington Post, or conservative websites like Breitbart or the Washington Times.  Shouldn't being impartial mean that we don't rush to judgment based on a knee-jerk analysis of incomplete facts?  Yet in our instant social media world, most news organizations believe that being first with a story trumps impartial accuracy.

If racial profiling and police brutality are genuine problems, then don't they need to be addressed in a manner that brings justice to their perpetrators and for their victims?  How is justice being served when the media, fully exploiting their ability to post propaganda under the guise of breaking news, is never held accountable for its impartiality?

Of course, the question of impartiality in the media extends to issues beyond racism, but these days, racism is a reliable flashpoint that is guaranteed to generate hits for the biased click-bait news websites need to justify their advertising rates.  Indeed, it's a lot easier to trigger national convulsions of rage and sorrow with websites and smartphone apps than it is newspapers, or even the nightly news.

Meanwhile, to the fans of the Supreme Court's most publicly quirky, lace-loving judge, a stiff dose of partiality resonates as robustly as the partiality regularly dispensed by her least favorite presidential contender does to his.  And the media laps it all up.

And we wonder why bias continues to fracture America's supposed Union?
_____

Update 7/14/16:  Justice Ginsburg has released a statement acknowledging that she regrets making such personal comments regarding a presidential contender.  But she did not apologize to Trump for them.