Here's a proposal offered only partly in jest: no resident of the United States whether born here or abroad should get to be a citizen until age 18 at which time each such resident has to take a test.

The reality is sobering: in the United States one in three girls will become pregnant before age 20 totaling more than 750 000 girls per year.

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age he wanted to be an Episcopal priest because he so admired his priest a black man from someplace called Haiti.