We are the cure

Grant Oliphant | President, The Heinz Endowments Early in Fiddler on the Roof, the character Tevye asks God, “Send us the cure. We’ve got the sick-ness already.” On Saturday both sickness and cure came home to my neighborhood of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh. The sickness came, as the entire country now knows and will too soon forget, in the form of a man filled with anti-Semitic hatred and armed with weapons of war who in his dark and meaningless rage slaughtered eleven innocents attending services at Tree of Life Synagogue. For much of that long terrible day, and lingering still, all I could sense was the sickness. You feel it in your bones, see it reflected back in the eyes of your friends and neighbors: the grief, the dread, the helplessness, the heavy sense that this is not the end. It was natural but pointless to ask how this could have happened. We know, we knew immediately. This ancient hatred, which America once fought a war to stop and my Dutch grandmother nearly died opposing, has been given new license in today’s America, along with so many other hatreds, so many vile new ways of beckoning old evils. But all… Read More

In the month since the school shootingat Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., which left 17 dead and numerous others wounded, the student leaders of the #NeverAgain movement have been able to move the needle on gun issues—even as many adults had thrown up their hands on the issues long ago. What’s more, the students’ impact has been significant: Read More

Gun violence is one of our nation’s most urgent public health and safety challenges, with more than 100,000 Americans killed or injured by guns every year. Notwithstanding overwhelming popular support for common-sense gun laws that would greatly reduce this carnage, reforming gun policy is difficult work. Read More