Our state law requires children to be instructed in "reading, writing, spelling, English grammar, geography, arithmetic and United States history and in citizenship, including a study of the town, state and federal governments." (Conn. Gen. Stat. 10-184)

How hard is that, really?

Earlier this month, conservative author Ann Coulter said Jews need to be "perfected" into Christians. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad routinely denies the Holocaust and says Israel needs to be "wiped off the map." Of Vanity Fair's recent "hundred most powerful people," more than half were Jewish when counted by the Jerusalem Post and checked by New York Magazine.

Do you remember where you were when the stock market crashed on Monday, October 19, 1987, plummeting more than 20 percent in a single day? What lessons have we learned two decades later? Can this sort of thing ever happen again?

I was 12 at the time, sitting in my eighth grade Social Studies class. When the clock ticked 9:32 a.m., the assistant principal poked his head in the room and pulled me out. This was well before cellphones and the internet and any other way of communicating other than calling the school with a message.

Last week the far-left Middlebury Institute, which wants Vermont to secede from the United States, joined with the far-right League of the South, which essentially wants to re-establish the Confederacy, for a two-day secessionist convention. Why wasn't Connecticut represented? For that matter, why wasn't Fairfield County?

If we understand the common thread between scores of monks arrested and beaten in Burma and the rationale behind civil rights activists like Jesse Jackson in defending six violent black teenagers in Louisiana, we will get a glimpse into the mind of George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.