The idea of food co-op organizers doing a feasibility study before launching their venture sounds a little like carnies holding sensitivity training for the guys who run the Whack-a-Mole game -- there’s a “What’s Wrong with this Picture” feel to it. But after talking to one of the organizers for the proposed Bethlehem Food Co-Op last week, I realized these people are not refugees from a Grateful Dead concert tour. This is not your hippie father’s food co-op. The “cooperators” – as they call themselves -- include business people and financial managers, lawyers, doctors, farmers, people who …

To the casual observer, the leafy vegetation in the corner of Diwan Hall at the Guru Nanak Sikh temple in Lower Nazareth looks like an ordinary houseplant. But to those who know how it got there, it’s a vessel. The plant was delivered to the Lehigh Valley congregation in the aftermath of the Aug. 5 shootings at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis. It came from a local well-wisher as a message of condolence and support for Sikhs everywhere. Area churches also wrote letters to the Valley Sikh congregation condemning the rampage and offering their prayers. Other people donated money to be …

I spent a recent afternoon in an experiment to see how long it might take to get a voter’s photo ID from the PennDOT Driver's License Center off Airport Road. I’ll tell you the results in a minute. It’s an important question because according to Pennsylvania’s Department of State, about 31,000 registered voters in the Lehigh Valley are without a current driver’s license or state issued non-driver ID that will enable them to vote in the Nov. 6 presidential election. Some of those folks have other official photo identification that will be accepted at the polls because they are a government …

Back in 1984 when I was living in Ireland for several months, I was asked by a teacher friend to speak to his class of inner-city Dublin kids. The students were middle-school age and came from poor families whose parents had limited education. When you asked these children about America, there were two places they knew without fail: New York City and Hollywood. They recognized New York because half their relatives lived there and they knew Hollywood because of all the American movies and TV shows they watched.  Now as then, pop culture is one of our biggest exports. The movies, television and…

  On a recent 13-minute drive home from baseball practice, my 15-year-old explained to me how World War I started. Mind you, I knew the bit about Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand being assassinated by a Bosnian Serb but I couldn’t have told you why other countries started joining in like it was a brawl at an NHL game.  For most of us, information has a use-it-or-lose-it quality. If we’re not called on in daily life to remember who was president during the Spanish-American War, it might slip our minds.  What stays are concepts. How America’s founders enshrined freedom of speech, religion and …

In 1904, writer Upton Sinclair spent several weeks living and working with immigrants in the meatpacking industry in Chicago. His observations of the misery and squalor there became the basis for his novel, “The Jungle,” which spurred widespread public revulsion over the unsanitary conditions in the plants. At the time, President Teddy Roosevelt called Sinclair, who was a socialist, “a crackpot” and sent emissaries to inspect the stockyards and plants. They reported back that conditions in the meatpacking plants were, in fact, revolting. Eventually, public pressure moved Congress to enact the…

(Editor's Note: Davis has recently contacted the Southern Lehigh School administration about this same issue. The complaint is currently under review) In 2010, a Lower Saucon Township resident tried to make the case that the Easton Area High School curriculum shouldn’t include the book “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.”   In the book, author Barbara Ehrenreich writes about taking a series of low-wage jobs in Florida, Maine and Minnesota to see if she could live on what she earned. Eric Adams complained to Easton Area’s school board that the book promotes socialist ideas and …

In 2005, Harry Drendall, a retired Easton Area music teacher, told me about being a student in a small Luzerne County school district in the 1930s when the school board met one night and fired five teachers.  He said most of the firings were to open up jobs for the offspring of prominent local families, and one teacher – a much-loved coach – was fired because he was Catholic. Drendall and others organized a town meeting and got the majority of the board to rehire the teachers.  Drendall died in 2010 at age 89; with the passing of his generation, it’s easy to forget the reasons teacher tenure …

Those in the Lehigh Valley who would like to turn back the clock on gay rights can pack it in right now. Game over. The fat lady has sung.  I say that because the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce – not exactly a charter member of Queer Nation -- is holding a kick-off event Friday morning for its new Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender (LGBT) Business Initiative. Doors open at 7:30 a.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn Allentown Bethlehem Airport at 1787-B Airport Road in Allentown.  It’s the first step toward starting an LGBT council within the Chamber that would provide networking and …

The gods of technology are angry with me for dissing Facebook in last week’s column and have been withholding the Internet from my home. In my defense, I said some nice things about Facebook too – hear that cyber gods? – but also that the storm and blackout showed how people need to cultivate flesh and blood friends. Our electricity came back on Wednesday after the storm but we still don’t have a working Internet, television or landline telephone.  Lack of WiFi at home has led me to spend a good chunk of every day at Starbucks at the South Mall in Allentown and in public libraries. This is …

There are movies – such as “Schindler’s List” – that you know you should see but don’t want to go through the experience of actually watching that kind of human horror.  Knowing that the terror, cruelty and pain inflicted are based on true events from the Holocaust makes it all the more agonizing. So you steel yourself because sometimes your job as a human being is to not look away.  I couldn’t bring myself to watch “United 93” when it first came out because when I rent movies, escapism usually wins out over “painful but important.”  But with the 10th anniversary of September 11 upon us, it …

What a week. In the middle of interviewing someone by phone last week, I feel the house start to shake. I’m ready to light into my teenage sons for jumping in the living room and they say, “Really mom, it wasn’t us, it was an earthquake.” They turn on CNN to prove it. Three days later, on the eve of Tropical Storm Irene, the Giant supermarket on Emaus Avenue in Allentown looks like a plague of locusts had hit the produce section. The only bananas left were a couple of  black spotted ones. The red seedless grapes were decimated and the handful of Gala apples were looking like escapees. I used …

There’s a concept in social psychology that goes something like this: When other people err, we attribute it to flaws in their character; when we screw up, we blame it on circumstances – the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. So when someone else runs up credit card debt, we think “spendthrift.” When we do it, it’s because of a medical emergency and necessary student loans.  Alan Jennings, executive director of the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley, says he has seen this type of thinking amplified since the economy tanked. Instead of sympathizing with those who lost their …

My idea of sweet decadence is reading a good book over a cup of strong coffee in a beautiful place. Clearly, if all Americans got their kicks this way, Las Vegas would still be a desert. So there I was last week on the porch of a cabin on a shimmering lake in the Adirondacks, binging on Edith Wharton novels. Wharton, a searingly honest social observer, trained her laser vision on America’s upper crust society in the late 1800s, exposing the rigid social mores that kept women in gilded cages. My husband doesn’t understand my fascination with writers like Wharton and Jane Austen, who wrote with…

There are some movies my family is so drawn to that when they come on television we watch them, commercials and all, even though we OWN them. How goofy is that? All we have to do is slip in the DVD and we can view them commercial-free, but no. They’re the celluloid equivalent of catnip or comfort food. In last week’s column about memorable movies, I gave short shrift to comedies because I wanted to zero in on films with good messages for kids. I’m not sure what the message is in the classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, unless it’s “Your mother is a hamster and your father smells of …

The average child costs $500,000 to raise to age 18 and the process takes great patience and energy. But, on the flip side, you get to foist your favorite movies on a captive audience. Seems like a fair trade to me. When our kids were small we started a list of the films we most wanted them to see before they went off on their own. These weren’t necessarily our all-time favorite flicks but they were memorable movies with messages we hoped they’d absorb. My list starts with films I’d show to kids as young as 6 and progresses to movies for older teens. Most are about doing the right thing, …

In a story in the April 25 edition of The New Yorker magazine, Nancy Lieberman talked about what it was like to coach basketball in the NBA’s Development League or D-League. The 53-year-old former Olympian and pro basketball player had to find ways to connect with young, mostly African-American men who played for her on the Texas Legends. Lieberman said, “I tell these guys we have more in common than you think. Young black men don’t want to be profiled, and old white women don’t want to be profiled." Amen to that. Young black men get profiled as dangerous and middle-aged and older white women…

The old saw “success has many parents but failure is an orphan” is never truer than when you’re dealing with actual kids. When your child brings home straight As or helps a little old lady carry her bags, it’s tempting to think “he gets that from my side of the family” or “I taught him that.” When that same kid throws a tantrum or refuses to clean his room, we think, “Where did THAT behavior come from?” We solve the “nature vs. nurture” question of child-raising by assuming if it’s a fault, he was born with it; the virtues come from us. As the parent of teenagers, I know it’s a bit early to …

Sea Isle City on the Jersey Shore is a lot of things, but it is most certainly the Park Bench Capital of America. Its slogan should be “Sit your butt down here.” On the town’s promenade – which is essentially a boardwalk without all the rides and games – there’s a bench just about every 10 feet. Each has an inscription dedicating it to someone, often accompanied by a quote about the person’s love for Sea Isle City. The benches are an amenity for tired pedestrians, a place to stop and talk, and a classy way of reminding people that the town is a great place to be. It’s just one of the facets …

With a memory clouded by age and Alzheimer’s, my mother-in-law had a tough time placing my husband during his most recent visit. Then all of a sudden it came to her: “Do you still live in that messy house?” Bingo. Nailed it. My husband and I had a good laugh but it’s sobering to realize that our poor housekeeping is what sticks with people – even those who love us. We are not yet candidates for the show “Hoarders” but that’s only because we’re HAPPY to get rid of stuff. We just can’t keep up with the influx of newspapers, magazines, junk mail, school papers and errant socks that my kids’ …