You may have noticed that over the months Carroll Fife has pretended to care about pedestrian safety, which she blabs about all the time. She has nothing to say about Sheng Thao’s scandals, or Oakland’s horrendous crime rate, for which she’s partly responsible, or about the burgeoning homeless encampments that degrade the district, include all over Lakeside Park, or about the businesses that daily abandon Oakland, further eroding our tax base.

Fifty-six years ago, in 1968, my friend Michael and I heard that our college campus had been taken over by anti-Vietnam War protesters. They’d seized the administration building and effectively shut down classes for the day, if not longer.

I find myself reading every word of Derald Wing Sue’s book, “Microaggressions in Everyday Life,” with fascinated horror, like when you drive by a hideous accident on the freeway and just have to rubberneck.

Sheng Thao blew Brenda Grisham’s mind when the mayor “walked up to me,” Grisham reports on Twitter, and said, “I don’t know what I did but I’m sorry."

Taeku Lee’s interesting, instructive book, “Mobilizing Public Opinion: Black Insurgency and Racial Attitudes in the Civil Rights Era,” examines the role of public opinion in galvanizing the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It became the considered opinion of the American people, especially after the horrendous events in Selma, Alabama, in1965, that segregation must end. The President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, on March 15, 1965, was compelled to issue a nationwide speech from the Oval Office, the first such on domestic policy in nineteen years. Less than four months later, in August, Johnson saw his Voting Rights Act passed by Congress—an act hailed as a landmark in the history of U.S. lawmaking.