Coach Bill / Dad, Entrepreneur Special Educator, American Political Scientist, Writer, Musician.

1. Who can understand economic oppression without the benefit of a solid education? Who can know how to see opportunity in the absence of an educational curriculum that shapes a lop-sided professional?  2. How can the quality of education, differing across America, lead to different individual outcomes for people?  3. Is it possible that not all education is of the same quality, leading towards the same purpose, and that their are advantageous gains for students in elite, private schools, as compared to inner city public schools?  4. What are powerful, positive actions that can accelerate the social and economic realities of an American citizenry, wherein all are afforded the finest educational supports needed to fully access the opportunities?  5. How would the raising of outspoken, critically-minded citizens be deemed beneficial to society? 6. Should we not have more citizens in tune, in participation, and in conversation regarding how the country move...

Frederick Douglass At His Desk They ranged between seventy five and ninety years of age, hailing from Chile, Colombia, Puerto Rico and Peru… all of them American citizens. I sat with them to have a conversation in Spanish, wake up the neurons, and get some profound intellectual brainwork happening. As it is, being a political scientist, I was chairing the conversation to gather understanding of different view points once presenting the case formally before them. Below are the conclusions of the conversation: Economic and Cultural Oppression How do you realize, how do you see the characteristics of economic and cultural oppression if you are not trained for it? Societally ingrained perspectives compress into standardized ways of thinking; these perceptual constructs surround us since infancy that we can not see the intricate interplay of what could simply be politically-charged machinery, meant to condition, desensitize and push us into desired view points, like cogs in a tradi...

How does a teacher create understanding that leads to empowerment in his or her students? What can be done to impart value on the urgency of seizing the moments we call hours and days?   Why should new generations of students care enough to make themselves mighty? Where are the Frederick Douglass’s of our time? Are we not them? Is the time of greatness past? What needs to be instilled to create champions out of ourselves? Is it so that modern culture anticipates and downplays the rise of our greatness, switching it for a commercialized version of human achievement and performance?  Can it be so that we are oppressed, and don’t even know it? What is a critical thinker and why are they so valuable to society?  What are critical thinkers capable of producing?  How do we teach critical thinking? …………………………….. The numbering of the above questions was not done in reverse of importance, but in reverse of impact to your intellectual digestion of the ...

Has the United States government allowed or failed to retain foreign access to its Southern border, thus allowing millions of individuals to enter the country illegally, rather than through legal processes and channels? In 2009, I visited the Central American country of Guatemala. A land steeped in culture, history and a population of citizens living in striking contrast to one another. Whereas the indigenous population of Mayan-descent Guatemalans have largely managed to retain customs and ways traditional to the indigenous ways of the mountainous and volcanic land, Guatemalan cities teem with an economic reality that exemplifies class inequality and stark social-economic class differences. On the front page of the morning newspaper I read about legislators nonchalantly telling the local media that they showed up at 11 am in the morning for work and not sooner because none of the other legislators ever showed up earlier than that time. My then-brother-in-law at the time, commen...

Idealism is nice, yet idealism that is too far removed from the realities of a present situation risks becoming nothing more than air castles in the sky. Finding common ground in a political maelstrom that is all too often directed by characters behind the scenes likewise risks becoming a futile exercise in impractical idealism. The truth of the matter may be that it behooves lobbying groups to seek the welfare of their deep-pocketed patrons to focus on the protection of their interests, even if it entails a narrow-minded scope of what is best for the operation of a country. In such a climate of lobbying groups, each representative of associations of corporations from singular industries, our elected officials are presented with the viability of receiving funding for their political campaigns to stay in office and therein perhaps achieve modest gains not just for their political patrons, but ideally, for the betterment of the country, if not there own political party, at the least...

A political scientist does not have a physical lab and a white coat with safety glasses on as they aggregate informational flows, sifting through information, unearthing tangible ideas and opinions, analyzing these and the conclusions thereof they arrive to, but they are on the cusp of practicing informed, independent, open-mined critical thinking. Their focus is on an understanding of the interaction of weak and powerful systems, organizations and entities, political movement flows, local, national and global culture dynamics, and the relationships between governments and the people that constitute these. What has happened in Germany? Unrestrained international compassion, as it would be, has overrun a nation’s capacity to bring the new culture into the pace of assimilation. The political strategy of purchasing the loyalty of an immigrant bloc can turn into a cultural Trojan Horse with unforeseen circumstances and loose ends, as the national security situation has shown to b...

Recently, the President of the United States of America formally acknowledged Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. It was a decision mainly met with contention from leaders in the Islamic world, and good tidings from Israel itself. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Jewish-state, staunch allies of the American government with deep cultural ties with the American Judeo-Christian culture, have marked the occasion of American recognition of Jerusalem with a joy that has been long in anticipation. In this essay, I briefly expand on the human rights component of the contending issue between Palestine and Israel, and on a wider lens, the use of Palestine by internal and external powers as a proxy to militarily fight the Jewish homeland, destabilize the safety of the region, and in effect create an uneasy status quo of constant existential threats. This middle-eastern city has historically been a staging ground of battle for thousands of years between Jewish, Chr...