A Kings

  • Racism and the Weight of History

    A meditation on hate, memory, and the long road back to each other. There are a lot of things we inherit from the human condition—curiosity, love, wonder, even a bit of mischief. But hate… hate is learned. Passed down like some poisonous heirloom, tucked into the corners of the soul where fear makes its home.…

    AKings

  • “Do You Remember?”

    By someone who still believes in mornings and the echo of old speeches. Do you remember? Back in October 1962, a young American president from Massachusetts stood his ground against a Soviet titan playing with fire 90 miles off our coast. John F. Kennedy — a Democrat — didn’t blink. He showed them what American…

    AKings

  • Superman, Storms, and the Death of Common Sense

    by someone who just wanted a quiet life, a decent sandwich, and a planet that hadn’t completely lost the plot. So here I am, staring at a blank screen, attempting to string together a story, something, anything— but all I can think about is how worryingly uninspired I feel these days. Not because life has…

    AKings

  • The Thin Blue Line

    The police. Yes, I know. They’ve had a bit of a PR disaster lately, haven’t they? A few bad apples, and suddenly the whole force is treated like they’ve been plucked straight out of a gangster movie. The whole institution’s been shoved into the same moral trash can. And of course, as if summoned by…

    AKings

  • The Weight of Silence, Echoes of a Broken Heart

    July 2012. I flew back to California with a broken heart, not like a girlfriend bad breakup kind, nor the one that stings when life simply doesn’t go your way. No, this was something deeper, something that reached into my very core and shattered everything I thought I knew about love, trust, and the life…

    AKings

  • Avenue of Heroes: Reclaiming Legacy with True American Titans

    This may sound a bit controversial—though, let’s be honest, controversy is just another word for honesty people don’t want to hear—but I overheard a discussion about Monument Avenue and the removal of Confederate statues. One person said, “But it’s part of Richmond’s landscape!” True. But so were open sewers and rickety wooden bridges, and we…

    AKings

  • Climate Change: Balancing Skepticism, Truth, and Survival.

    Let’s start with this: ever imagine if global warming is real? Like, properly real. Not just a mildly inconvenient uptick in summer temperatures where the only real consequence is that your ice cream melts before you’ve even left the shop. I’m talking about apocalyptic, California-on-fire, Florida-underwater, polar-bear-now-a-shark’s-lunch sort of real. Terrifying, isn’t it? But equally,…

    AKings