Blog: THE Point

The basic ingredients that U.S. veterans need to successfully re-enter civilian life are not mysterious, but getting the government, businesses, and, yes, other citizens to develop meaningful ways to assist veterans in the transition has been unfortunately frustrating. On this Veterans Day, Endowments President Grant Oliphant urges all of us to do better.

Could any serious person really have been surprised about what happened in Georgia? It was an aberration neither as an act of anti-Asian violence nor as a mass shooting, neither as an attack on women nor as an expression of a society struggling with its own highest values. 

Countless sages throughout history have taught that the measure of us all—individuals, community, country and humanity—is not the cards we are dealt, but how we play them. We do not endure and prevail by denying reality, but by having the integrity to face what challenges and discomforts us and to demand justice in the face of its opposite.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s efforts to silence the voices of its own staff — beginning with two black journalists who were barred from covering Black Lives Matter protests and related stories — are an outrage. At a time when we need good local news coverage and the perspectives of black journalists the most, the PG is on the wrong side of history.

Heinz Endowments President Grant Oliphant’s latest blog in the wake of the recent violence against black Americans.

What we need now is the unique strengths of every sector in our society—for-profit, nonprofit and government—working together not just to get past this crisis but ultimately to prevent its recurrence and the perpetuation of the harms it has both caused and revealed.