Morality #1: Do that which pleases God.

Morality #2: Do that which results in human flourishing.

When I watched the video of Derick Chauvin lynching George Floyd, I kept getting flashbacks to Rodney King lying in the street with cops surrounding him, beating him, trying to kill him. Given last summer we were in the middle of a pandemic, I didn’t expect the reaction of the country and the world, the massive (mostly) peaceful protests. I expected things to burn.

Naturally, the cops in the Rodney King incident were ruled “innocent.” What we saw with our own eyes was not a problem. Business as usual. Nothing to see here. …

The life coaching mindset starts out in self-consciousness and ends in self-awareness. Getting from one state to the other takes some time and isn’t ever complete.

Most people who learn life coaching start out self-conscious. While we are usually comfortable having conversations with people, a life coaching conversation has a different technique. A lucky few get it naturally and the rest of us learn it over time. Self-management is how we do that.

Get curious

What you work for is self-awareness. Your presence is requested. Acknowledge your nerves, and your stage fright and consciously allow it to relax. Then the next step…

There is a script we have been following for about a century and a half.

Act I: White people treat black people worse than they would treat animals.

Act II: Black people object.

Act III: White people tell each other that these are rioters and slaughter as many as they can.

Act IV: Things go quiet.

Until it happens again.

St. Louis, 1917, and again Chicago, 1919, and again Tulsa 1921, and again Little Rock, Ar., 1927. There are hundreds of these. I’m going to skip around. Detroit, 1943, Birmingham, Al, 1963, Los Angeles.1964, Chicago again, 1966, Chicago again, 1976,1977, Miami, Fla. 1980, Los…

I was in my favorite boutique dispensary the other day. A couple of young men worked behind the counter. They were lovely — friendly, informative, polite. They laughed at my lame jokes.

After everything was bagged up and I was ready to go I had to talk about something that had been bugging me.

“You guys work in a small store, you meet the public all day and you aren’t wearing masks.”

They looked at me like they had been watching a play and one of the actors started talking to them directly. They didn’t say anything, which was good…

Recently in a wealthy St. Louis district, a couple pointed guns at BLM protesters strolling by on the sidewalk. It was more than a little hair-raising to watch rather ordinary Americans pointing guns at a bunch of other ordinary Americans who were too close and in too large numbers.

They are lawyers! You’d think they’d assume they would be arrested for assault and they’d be disbarred. They had to know what they were doing was illegal.

Nah, I’m kidding.

They probably thought some version of “I have a right to protect my life and property!” They probably thought the castle…

I’m sorry, but that heritage is slavery and Jim Crow. Don’t tell me that you never owned a slave. The only reason you’ve never owned a slave is because the South lost the war. If they had won you would likely own slaves today because they would be a symbol of your innate superiority over the black race and your victory over the people who have become “the libs.”

In the early 19th century (and long, long before that), the view of nearly all white people was that any person of color was automatically inferior. “Race” was a reference to…

I want to re-litigate the “war between the states” otherwise known as the “American Civil War.”

There is a widely held belief that the civil war ended in 1865 when the Noble and Godlike General Robert E. Lee surrendered at the Appomattox Courthouse.

But that was not the end. The Confederacy never carried the war to the Union States, almost all of the destruction and death took place in the south. The south had most of its meager infrastructure destroyed. After 1864, diehard insurgents still fought either as the “KKK” or simply as terrorists mostly targeting black people. …