Us & Them

Moazzam Begg, a British citizen of Pakistani heritage, and Albert Melise, a former housing police officer in the Boston area, were unlikely to have their life stories intersect and become friends; but then September 11 happened. After the Bush Administration launched the War on Terror, Begg was detained and held at the U.S. Detention Camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Melise was a Gitmo guard. You can’t get much more Us & Them than that.

For a little more than a century, there’s been at least one concentration camp somewhere on earth. The fact that camps still exist and that humans can justify forcing other humans into such inhumane living conditions is the “us and them” dynamic taken to the most vile extreme. For this episode, Trey interviews journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. She says that the legacy of camps started in Cuba and continues there to this day.

How old were you when you first learned that police may think of you as a threat? You’ve never been told that? Chances are you’re not African American. In this episode, Trey Kay examines “The Black Talk,” which is the sober conversation that many black families have with their teenage kids – particularly teenage boys – about how they should conduct themselves when stopped by the police. Spoiler alert: Black parents, like any parent, want their kids to come home alive.

Despite all the fuss about sex education in America, students get precious little of it. Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian, tells Trey how Americans spend more time arguing about what kids should learn about human sexuality in schools than they actually do teaching anything about it.

On Friday, January 22nd, 2016, I was in New York City preparing to head to West Virginia. So was a blizzard called Jonas. The blizzard that took the East Coast by storm hadn’t hit by the time I rolled into in Harrisburg, PA.  I was assured by meteorologists that I shouldn’t try driving down I-79 to Charleston, but that I could make it to Pittsburgh without encountering snow. This podcast tracks my experience on the Pennsylvania Turnpike between the Bedford and Somerset exits, and the TWENTY-SEVEN AND A HALF hours I remained there, trapped in snow.

What do you do when a panhandler hits you up for some money? Whatever your answer is, what experiences or facts inform your policy for giving or not giving? People have strong opinions on this. With this episode we try to separate the facts, suppositions and ideology.

Everyone knows the song "Amazing Grace." People who don’t even consider themselves spiritual or religious find it meaningful. And while John Newton penned the hymn to connect with Christians, it has transcended religion and become a folk song and an anthem for civil rights. But the origins of the song are just a bit more complicated...

Merriam-Webster declared that the word for 2017 is 'feminism.' The term was the most-looked-up on their online dictionary, and there were 70% more searches for the word this year than in 2016. Trey feels this couldn’t be more timely because this year, he’s seen women effecting a change in the balance of power in ways that he’s never experienced before. In a way, he sees the whole thing like an earthquake that’s been a long time in coming. He’s trying to wrap his mind around what the New Year might hold for the sexual misconduct “tsunami” the earthquake has unleashed. To try to get a handle on all of this, Trey sits down with his friends Lauren Schiller of the *Inflection Point *podcast and Nancy Giles of the CBS Sunday Morning Show and The Giles Files podcast.

We revisit the story of “Steve,” a young New Hampshire man that we met back in the spring of 2016. In our episode called “The Changing Face of Heroin,” we followed him and his father as he reported for the last visit of a court ordered drug rehab program. As you can imagine, kicking a powerful opioid habit isn’t easy, but in many ways our guy remained committed to the program. Sometimes, it was nearly impossible and during those times the strain on his family and loved ones was immense. For this new episode, we learn how everyone is doing more than 19 months later.

On November 21, 2016, William Pulliam, a 62-year-old white man, shot James Means, a 15-year-old African-American boy, after the two had an argument outside of a Dollar General Store in Charleston, WV. The shooting conjured memories of the death of Trayvon Martin after it was reported that in his confession, Pulliam told police, “The way I look at it, that’s another piece of trash off of the street.” In this episode, Us & Them host Trey Kay works to understand who are Means and Pulliam, but moreover, what can this senseless killing tell us about race relations in small town America in 2017.

Trey speaks with journalist Linda K. Wertheimer, the author of Faith Ed: Teaching About Religion In an Age of Intolerance. In her book, she has a chapter titled “The Church Lady,” where she recounts her experience of her family moving from western New York to a town in Ohio. The Wertheimers were the only Jews in that community. Linda and her brother felt confused and ostracized when a lady came to their classroom each week to lead a class that felt less like social studies and more like Sunday school. Linda recalls all of her classmates singing, “Jesus Loves Me,” but she was the only one who didn’t know the words.

High-profile confrontations between African-Americans and police officers have fueled tensions across the country. West Virginia is NOT a place where people are comfortable talking about these things. But in Trey's hometown of Charleston, some of the key players are now bringing this tension out into the open.

Errol Randle is a cop in Charleston, WV. He thinks police have to do more than arrest bad guys: they should also help fix struggling communities. He champions a program that encourages officers to resettle among Charleston’s high crime neighborhoods. While some residents welcome the boots-on-the-ground, embedded police presence, others are suspicious.

At a time when the President of the United States questions the patriotism of African American football players protesting social injustice, we present the civil rights struggle of another African American who, nearly 50 years ago, broke a color barrier in the NFL -- James “Shack” Harris, the first black player in history of NFL to earn a job as starting quarterback.

Like many from his state, Trey was weaned on the jingle “Coal is West Virginia!” For this episode, we meet two West Virginians who see the mining industry in completely different ways: one who believes coal is the lifeblood of the state's workers; the other who argues coal is to blame for keeping West Virginians poor.