In December, its lawmakers passed a law where Arizona can ban classes, with their anti-ethnic studies law, HB2281, is trying to ban classes that’ll sew division or dissent.  What kind of dissent scares them?

Here are the bill’s prohibitions; it bans any curricula that:

1. Promote the overthrow of the United States government.

2. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.

3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.

4. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.

Most people say that they hate censorship, or at least, that it’s bad.  The idea of banning or burning books frightens and anger many people.  Those books tend to push tradition hot buttons; and young, impressionable people to consider ideas that push their boundaries in a broad range of ways.  Those books challenge the mainstream mindset, and are often in dispute in junior high and high school lesson plans.

This law clashes with the individualism and independence, which Americans often celebrate and say distinguishes our society from those, which are uncivilized. Pres. Reagan is revered for having warned us about the consequences of being disagreeable toward one another while we disagree.  Banning whole academic subjects is disagreeable.

To create a law that bans those classes, which many moderate- and progressive-minded people consider good and, well, progressive, sounds like a 21st Century take on a tactic, which 20th Century Southern activists used against agitators.  We need to ban activities that provoke trouble.

In April, The Root made an interesting point about those fans of that bill, who criticize ethnic scholarship after having read the theses or dissertations’ titles, but not the content.

Conservative people routinely praise the virtues and values of college degrees, most people with those degrees would, in addition, praise the capacity for and interest in independent, critical and creative thinking.  Yet, from the manner in which this bill was written, those who wrote this have an inconsistent grasp of these skills.  That seems to be a common streak in those who yearn to prohibit either actions or information, whether it is books, ideas, movies, etc.

Why won’t Anglo- or America-oriented classes, which praise Anglo-Saxon foundations of American history and cultural sensibilities breed a similar although different sort of dissent among Arizonans?  Aren’t the core and mainstream classes simply specific to the majority culture?  You assume that core classes are themselves ethnocentric, with a bias toward and emphasis on Anglo culture and sensibilities.  They will have to be banned, too.

I believe that this is the operative question: which community’s resentment or dissent do they fear?

No doubt, at least twice a year someone or something reminds you that, save for Sir Richard Branson, whose work and passion are one and the same, no one ever said, “I wish I spent more time at the office.”  He wrote a memorable book, “Losing My Virginity,” about how he began his career.

Fifteen to twenty-years-ago, (before the Millennial people and their compatriots took reign) the array of news and entertainment daunted us: books, movies, TV programs, newspapers and magazines, and, for the worldly, all of these in myriad languages.  Now, we have web 2.0, and distractions abound – exponentially?  When you’re ambitious, distractions are enemies.

Two-thirds of 2012 remains.  You want to take the time to appreciate life away from work: spend time with good books, memorable movies, fast friends and great love.  Are you sure of your priorities, and how much time and energy you want to apportion to those?

Maybe you wonder, “what’s the hurry?”  That’s fine; if you’re content to reside in the present moment, deemphasizing a time-conscious mentality and lifestyle, farewell.

If you’re ambitious, maybe you want to catch up on the list of Best Picture winners from the Film Independent Spirit Awards, peruse and commit to a selection from the latest list of banned books, learn a new recipe every month, or spend more time with someone special?  Unless you expect to live vicariously through the “Time Enough at Last” episode of “The Twilight Zone,” from 1959, you need to confirm your personal, post-work priorities.

Bottom-Line: before yet another no longer new year ends, you want to venture beyond your daily routine, the work-a-day life complacency.

One of my favorite quotations, “Death tugs at my ear and says ‘live; I am coming’,” which is less aphoristic than most, wins out because it’s pithy.  Time passes rapidly.  If you’re ambitious, and you don’t manage your energy and strategic priorities with that knowledge, you’ll want to kick yourself, or worse.

Rodney King's image beside that of his biography, "The Riot Within"

1992: I was much younger then, when the not guilty verdict, which still boggles my mind, came down.  The incident left people glued to their TVs, and dumb founded.  There was no Facebook; the internet was an infant, experimental thing.  If you had a cell phone, you had money.  It was the first time that such an attack, by police officers had been recorded and would be used in a trial.  It’s difficult to remember those images and the feelings that they stirred.

During the uprising, Spike Lee & Co. were in the middle of editing his opus “Malcolm X,” and flying to Los Angeles for a meeting with executives at Warner Brothers; Los Angeles was an inferno in a few morose ways.

1991: An irony is that, just one year prior, in 1991, America saw a boon of black-made movies released.   It was more of those than were released during the whole of the 1980s, when Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby helped to rule entertainment.  Those relative spots of success in entertainment served as notable counterpoints to tragic, vicious pummeling of Mr. King.

2012: Twenty years later, our first-term Kenyan-American president vies for a second one, and above all, after the economy, another opportunity to guide America toward that more perfect union.  America and the world expected, unjustly, that his charisma and oratory would herald a Camelot-like era; one, which would rid us of arguably inevitable color biases and prejudices.

And, yet, a teenager, Trayvon Martin, from Sanford, FL, is dead because George Zimmerman felt threatened.  This weighs on, and divides our society and psyches.  The pummeling of Rodney King, the trial and not-guilty verdict, which followed, did too.

Optimism?  Another Rodney King tragedy could occur this year; some people would handily argue that Mr. Martin’s killing is that one.

My god: what 20 years can wreak, and remind us of?

Co-star, César award winner, Omar Sy, dances in "Intouchables" from 2011

One image and message, which are often one and the same, is the young black man.  Recently, two images, and their innate problems, have captivated imaginations, and ideas of “justice,” in the U.S.  The most troubling and divisive is the killing of Trayvon Martin, and the incomprehensibly late arrest of his assailant.  Somehow Mr. Martin was perceived as the stereotypical menacing, young black man.  That’s best described, in the 1993 film “Menace II Society:” young, black, and don’t give a fuck.  Another is a French film, “Intouchables,” from 2011, which is so popular that one-third of France, 20-milllion people, has seen it.  One Minnesota scholar of French compared it to “Driving Miss Daisy.”  The lead character, Driss, is a young, ne’er do well black man, from Senegal, who has a complex personal history, and a basic criminal one.  Driss is a handsome, irrepressible, immature man stuck in the life that often exists in the metropolitan ghettos of France, as it does in America’s.  He becomes a health aide to a rich, quadriplegic French man, serving as a conditional confidante; and as a muse to venture beyond his singular and insular comfort zone.

“Intouchables” is amusing, but if you’re prone to thoughtfully watch movies, you’ll probably notice a bevy of story tropes.

Both images, of Trayvon Martin in life and Driss in fiction, as an intouchable, harken to stereotypes, even story tropes: Trayvon was killed by a man who totes some heavy mental and cultural baggage in regard to young, black men.  To him, that character was more of a bogeyman, and less a man, less of flesh and blood.  He found and killed Mr. Martin In such a mentality.  For Mr. Zimmerman, somehow a young, clean-cut brown-skinned man, carrying Skittles resembled the ghetto monster, O-Dog, in “Menace II Society.”

Larenz Tate, as O-Dog, in "Menace II Society" from 1993.

The darker, the blacker, the more self-assured a man is, he is also that much less likely he is to be gullible, and swallow or see himself reflected in those silly, and destructive messages.  So, he poses a greater the threat; he will not be controlled.

The more I live, grow and learn, it seems like the folks, who are the most likely to turn over their leaves from prejudice to progress are those who need a mere nudge.

Those conversations reminded me about how much I appreciate other foreign films: “Walk on Water,” from 2004, and “The Holy Land,” from 2001.  Both of them are from Israel.

More and more often North American movies rely on other countries’ moneys for success.  If you read movie critics’ columns often enough you know how often American movies depend on foreign rights and revenues in order to be make films, and in-turn profits.

The Artist Poster on the Tube from Annie Mole

I was reminded about films, like those mentioned above, that beg to be recommended to friends.  After having answered one friend’s question about “The Artist,” which I’ve not yet seen, I recommended those Israeli films.

And, yet foreign films seems to strike Americans as strange or out-of the way; literally foreign.  More so than necessary.

Why do so many American movie-goers flock to American-made titles, while also whining about a decline in their quality, value and ingenuity?

• A common complaint about foreign movies is having to deal with subtitles.
• Maybe there’s a snob factor, or an assumption that foreign film fans are a club, and you have to pay dues?

Hey.  When you run out of American films you want to watch why not turn to the best ones from France, Israel, the United Kingdom or elsewhere?

The crisis: bullying in itself is even more barbaric and cruel in our social media epoch than it used to be.   It devastates youngsters in their formative years.  For a myriad of complicated reasons schools seem disinclined to punish the bullies.

This film aggressively exposes the crisis, and the filmmakers aren’t timid with the profanity that the children use.  The politico-artistic problem: the MPAA disputes how appropriate the profanity in the film is, and in-turn gave “Bully” an R rating.  Historically subtlety is not their friend.  The vital subtlety is about why the use of the “F-word” in different contexts, and stories, for different reasons can have different meanings.

What’s provincial about the MPAA’s sensibilities: consider the words of Chicago Tribune film critic, Michael Phillips.

In the interest of fairness, I am opining without yet having seen the film.  But concerns about the rating associations’ usefulness have persisted at a low hum for years.

This specific dispute has made headlines from Los Angeles, which is often conflated with Hollywood, to the world.

Here’s one argument more potent and memorable than Mr. Phillips’ words: this 2006 documentary “This Film is Not Yet Rated.”

Before the MPAA came, movies were censored by the Motion Picture Production Code, aka the Hays Code, which reigned from 1930 through 1967.  And, then, in 1968, two years after its birth, the Association established and offered basic sense ratings.  But that basic sense got lost when it came to films being judged beyond the MPAA’s provincial standards.

Why do so many Americans still heed our movie ratings system?

Why should or would a nation-wide standard reign when every region, and state in-general has and abides by its own sensibilities?

Ms. Smalls is the first model of color to be on a fashion magazine’s cover in four years.

“Vogue Italia” commanded attention in 2008 when it published its all black edition, with a black woman gracing its cover.

But it also did that when it called a pair of earrings, worn in a runway show, “slave earrings.”

This raises chronic, persistent and off-putting questions about what color beauty is. That reminds me of a brief Canadian-produced documentary, “The Colour of Beauty” that was released in 2010.

It addressed questions of bias and bigotry in fashion and beauty, and the American and international psyches that feed from that. A “white girl dipped in chocolate” is how the successful black models are described. They do not have typically African-American features. Of course, most first worlders are so used to seeing and in-turn deeming that light skin, the lightest skin is the height of beauty. That prevails in our culture, and then in the minds of many young women.

One story, for which I wasn’t paid, but which was fun, parrots the Joker if he were to ask about “important movies”: “Why So Serious?”

As America faces down the Oscars, listen to my story: “What Makes a Movie ‘Important?’”

Is leaving my web presence out-of-date for weeks, while I worked on and pondered a strategic improvement, and let my blog sit.

While I often enjoyed writing film reviews and critiques, I missed reporting stories. And, so, I stepped away from writing about and appraising movies, but not my passion for them.

I need to unveil Wright’s Words’ new site, but it’s not yet ready for primetime.  If you want to know about my work or background, please go here.

This is a familiar phrase.  We hear it in war movies, such as “G.I. Jane.”  In fact for some, it’s banal and shallow.  Why: how much do we learn from our success?  And how much more from our screw-ups?

There’s a book about “Celebrating Failure: The Power of Taking Risks, Making Mistakes and Thinking Big.”

This prevailing question about the good, which comes from failure, bubbled up in my brain because of a piece in the “Wall Street Journal:” The Art of Failing Successfully.

Which experience teaches us, or impels us to grow the most?  It ain’t that wonderful triumph!

While awards and handshakes are splendid, and affirm each of us, our mistakes and wrong-headed decisions, or judgment calls teach us in ways success cannot.

Ask anyone who’s tried the untried; ask Steve Jobs.

Ask the folks behind the Apollo 13 mission; in the movie, mission chief Jim Lovell’s colleagues described it as a successful failure.