The other day, I was invited to play my violin with a real band at a live music festival. It’s an aspiration I’ve had since freshman year of high school, and it’s pretty high on my bucket list. Excited, I immediately started texting my musician friends from back then to tell them the good news.
Manaolana | Karen Osborne: What if you were a refugee?
I was shopping at the neighborhood corner store, just minding my own business, when the cashier started to talk with his customer about the refugee crisis in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are streaming into Europe from war-torn Syria, Iraq and other Middle East and African countries. They are looking for an escape from […]
Manaolana | Karen Osborne: A concert with good music and life lessons
I went to a One Direction concert with my niece last week. Many fellow adults winced when I told them. Some said they were “sympathetic,” but, truth be told, I had a lot of fun. It was comparatively low-key. There were pyrotechnics at the beginning and at the end of the concert. There were smoke […]
Manaolana | Karen Osborne: Providing hope where none seems to exist
I’ve been thinking a lot about hope, lately. I live in Baltimore and for the past few weeks, we’ve been in the news for peaceful and violent reasons. We’ve seen the entire spectrum of protest, from burning police cars to calm speeches in front of City Hall following the death of Freddie Gray, a Baltimore […]
Manaolana | Karen Osborne: Youth presence at pro-life event shows commitment
For many years, teenagers have walked in the March for Life, the annual pro-life demonstration in Washington that recently marked its 42nd anniversary. The event aims to bring awareness to the laws surrounding legalized abortion, hoping to change them. It attracts people of all ages from all over the country, united in one common […]
Manaolana | Karen Osborne: The modern world stage and civility
The other day, the face of a young man in a red Target employee T-shirt appeared on my Twitter feed over and over again, mostly because people thought he was cute. His hashtag, #alexfromtarget, soon appeared in the national trending topics. The Target employee, Alex, is a regular teenage boy from a regular town, living […]
Manaolana | Karen Osborne: Go offline (and connect to real life)
Yesterday, I left my cellphone on the kitchen table when I left the house. It felt as if the apocalypse happened. The first hour wasn’t so bad. It was bright and early in the morning, and I had coffee to drink and work to do. The second hour was a little worse. I really wanted […]