To define ourselves as a nation of laws has been to misconstrue and misinterpret, by presidents and police chiefs, senators and security guards. It’s been the impetus, in some cases, behind unnecessary enforcement actions, brutal reactions, wrongful convictions and even the killing of unarmed civilians.

To be a nation of laws is not to be a nation of martial law, and the countries where that happens at the drop of a hat, where the slightest undercurrent of discontent brings with it batons and bullets from uniformed regimes, is halfway around the world, not in our own backyard.

What has happened this week in Ferguson, Mo., is shameful and, sadly, becoming all too familiar in America, where the proportional response is growing grossly out of proportion to the threat. In Missouri there is an obvious element of racial injustice that has been and will be debated for what seems like forever...

Is California ground zero in the War of Poverty, the West Coast Theatre where the haves and have nots stare each other down, waiting for someone to blink?

The nature of a capitalist economy, the miasma of despair, these are conspiratorial forces at work to keep the poor poor and overcoming exclusive to only the psychologically strongest. It’s the cross pollination of Charles Darwin’s survival of the species and Adam Smith’s place as the father of capitalism and modern economics.

Honestly, I don’t understand enough about either theory to defend that, but it feels right. Especially in California.

We live in the world’s ninth-largest economy, where Hollywood moguls and Internet millionaires rub elbows with billionaire venture capitalists over dinner and drinks as the country’s largest concentration of those living in poverty — 24 percent, nearly 9 million people — dream of a crumb...

Chances are if you have anyone in your home under the age of 14, you’ve heard of Steve … just Steve. That’s all he goes by.

In that case, you may have intimate knowledge of the powers of redstone, the allure of mining diamonds, the confusing and complicated world of mods, maps and skins, or, worse yet, Stampy Longhead and his annoying British accent streaming into your brain via YouTube.

At this very minute, some of our kids are with Steve, evading Creepers, shooting zombies, forging a fake life in survivor mode and raising digitized chickens, cows and sheep, and, principally, constructing bulky but elaborate structures and worlds out of 8-bit blocks.

Minecraft. If you hadn’t already guessed.

For the children who cause us those deep, throbbing tension headaches and are a nuisance better left to their own devices, Minecraft is the best game ever created — the modern babysitter and BFF...

Holy Depends, Batman, you’re an old fart.

After 75 years of brooding in the shadows, working out mommy and daddy issues and taking out your repressed grief and endless wellspring of anger on the scum of the earth, you’re as conflicted as ever.

Let it go, man. They’re not coming back.

Maybe it’s time to show some growth, Bats. Quicksilver has come out of the closest. Spider-Man has been a half black, half Puerto Rican boy. Thor is a chick. Captain America is a brother.

In comic lore, times are changing. Could Bruce Wayne capture the zeitgeist from working in a bicurious tryst with a new, street legal, youthful ward? Just asking.

No? You’re probably right. Characters like Batman don’t need growth; not as long as human beings identify with misplaced anger and pathos run amok. Superman will always be for truth and justice, and be indestructibly boring. The Hulk will always be a 1-ton...

I’ve yet to see a silverback gorilla pitching his own wildlife preserve in the jungles of the Congo, but stranger things have happened.

It was made clear to me this week when CareerCast.com released its annual report on the most endangered jobs of 2014 that I have to do something to help my profession; I have to be that 800-pound gorilla if I’m to save print journalism.

In the top 10 worst jobs in America to have — from the bottom of a list of 200 career outlooks — being a newspaper reporter/print journalist ranks No. 4, or No. 197, depending on how you look at it.

With an annual median salary of $37,090 and a job market that is expected to diminish 13 percent by 2022, things are grim for our species, as many of us are being poached by public relations firms, the gradual rise (again) of Dot Coms, Starbucks and more than a few sources who would like to see our hands used as ash trays...

The year was 1979; Santiago Flores was 5 years old.

Told to stay down and pretend he was sleeping, he and his mother and brother, in a station wagon, made it through the border checkpoint on the way to be with his dad in South Bend, Ind.

They were from the state of Zacatecas, Mexico, and, yes, they were undocumented immigrants going to meet their father working illegally in Middle America.

“Chago,” now 40, recalls clutching a Mexican flag as he went through the border, only to have it blown out of his hand and out the window of the station wagon.

A little too symbolic? Sure. But it happened, he said, and it would proudly be replaced by an American flag from that day forward.

Today, Chago is visuals editor and an award-winning photojournalist with the South Bend Tribune in the “home” town where he grew up.

Today, he is a U.S. citizen and has been since 2003, gaining legal temporary...

America is a strange animal; it’s both a country of contrasts and a land of homogeny, an ever-evolving palette of social, financial and political contradictions.

E pluribus unum, “out of many, one,” yet aut ex uno plures, “out of one, many.”

As a people, we are as divided as ever, defining ourselves through the black and white of party allegiances, a cable media morass that wedges more than informs, moral issues that come with judgments of immorality, and perceptions and misconceptions of freedoms.

These chasms play out in reactions to the thousands of Central American migrant children and families being distributed throughout the Southwest, to name just one in dozens and possibly hundreds more hot-button issues that keep the collective psyche a split personality.

National health care, Common Core curriculum, the War on Terror and the spread of Democracy. Racial equality, government...

They shuffle along the aisles of local grocery stores to keep cool in the summer, dirty and smelly with nowhere else to go, raising eyebrows in some cases, compassion in others, and ire in most.

The worst among them babble incoherently to no one in particular; some are simply disruptive to our day, some are wild-eyed and a little scary; some are calm and looking to be left alone, some are combative and aggressive.

And the best among us sit at the desk next to you, cry themselves to sleep at night, miss workdays due to dark days, don’t take you up on offers to go out for a drink, not because of anti-social behavior or minor phobias, but because they are in the grips of the same types of brain imbalances that makes life for them just as difficult as that of the derelict and the delusional, or the self-medicating alcoholic and the shut-in.

The common theme is mental illness, in all its...

To find one’s self knighted in the service of a culture war is a heavy responsibility for one young man, and it’s not quite clear whether Brooks Hamby fully understands his role as free speech crusader, or more accurately, the role others are thrusting upon him.

Clearly he is smart and extremely articulate, destined for a role as leader of men, but he is still a manchild being burdened with the weight of other people’s expectations to further a perception and give a doe-eyed, smooth-skinned face to an agenda that might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

So far young Brooks seems a willing participant to the national adulation, but he came off a little smug on “Fox & Friends”; smug might not be the right kind of reaction one would want to go with in a minor news story that has been covered with nearly no balance and pushed almost entirely through a famously biased conservative Christian...

When the USA takes on Ghana in its opening match of the 2014 World Cup, Ruben “Cat” Felix of El Centro will be there, decked out in red, white and blue, one of 45,000 soccer fanatics crammed into Estadio das Dunas in Natal, Brazil, on Monday.

The 40-year-old Felix, head coach for the freshman boys’ soccer squad at Central Union High School, is a substitute teacher in the district spending his vacation at World Cup, where when all is said and done he will have seen seven matches with his two cousins and traveling companions.

While Imperial Valley residents and all of Mexico seemed to be cheering on “El Tri’s” 1-0 opening victory over Cameroon on Friday morning, Felix was in the crowd then, too, sitting among tens of thousands of Mexican soccer fans in a literal sea of green, as Felix described intermittent downpours that left the Natal crowd drenched but did nothing to dampen its...