BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  OCT 13, 2025 

In September, I read a column by Colbert K. King in the Washington Post that has troubled me ever since. It was his last column in the Post after he announced in June that he was scaling back, in part due to an illness that hospitalized him.

I’ve followed King for many years in Washington because of his tempered insights, reasoned thinking, seasoned by his intolerance for injustice. His character, calmness, and the kind of civic intimacy he expressed for his beloved city gave you the sense that he could be trusted and that his commentaries were an honest and sincere reflection of his experiences and perspective.

King, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize who has an endowed chair in his honor at Howard University, has had a distinguished career in journalism that began and has ended with the Post.

The September column seemed ominous. “My time is passing, and the hour is dark,” he wrote, “but I hold faith that wrong will be righted in the end.”

His column began with a wonderful tribute to his mother and father.

“’Take care of your mother’ was the last full sentence spoken by my father, Isaiah King, before he died in 1990. He was my rock, just as he was to my two siblings, Lucretia and Cranston. However, my mother, Amelia, was the take-charge person. She sounded the early-morning wake-up call, put food on the table, got us out the door for school, had dinner ready in the evenings and made us wash up for bedtime. She brought extra money into the house by washing and ironing rich folks’ clothes (which I dutifully delivered in upscale Northwest Washington enclaves) while also leaving the house to do ‘day’s work’ as a domestic. And after getting us three Kings through college, she went on to land a bachelor’s and master’s degrees and a DC public schools teaching job, all after the age of 50.

“But it was my father, a 10th grade dropout, who was the family’s backstop. He was the reinforcement that kept my mother and the rest of us afloat, and from straying too far beyond the fields on which we played. Isaiah King was Mr. Dependable. Yet on a fateful early-spring morning 35 years ago, Daddy knew that his time had come, and that my mother – dynamo though she was – would need bolstering and support. That she needed a strong back to do heavy lifting. A shoulder on which to lean. A hand to hold when she was losing her grip, even if she didn’t like to let on. ‘Take care of your mother’ wasn’t a request. It was a command. Which is where I find myself at this late-September stage of my life and career. As my dad said, dear reader, I say to you: ‘Take care.’ Take care of yourselves and one another. Take care of our city. Take care, l dare I say it, of our country.”

Amen. Take Care, Mr. King.

Do Not Restrict Your Exposure to Contrary Thought

Did you know that censorship hurts your brain?

Yes, it does, according to Barbara Oakley, Oakland University professor writing in the Wall Street Journal last month: “Our brains are built to form habits…deep learning circuits that automate whatever we repeat…also wired in patterns of thought. If the only messages we hear are one-sided, the brain’s habit circuits carve then into grooves of thought that resist change.”

“Rigidity at the neural level breeds rigidity at the civic level,” she explained. “Economists studying East Germany…found that decades of socialist rule left scars on behavior: Citizens became more cautious, less entrepreneurial, and slower to trust…”

“Neuroscience also shows that cognitive flexibility isn’t automatic. Like any skill, it must be trained…Ghent University cognitive scientist Senne Braem and colleagues showed that when people are rewarded for switching tasks, they later switch more readily—even without realizing why. When switching is discouraged, they become more rigid. Flexibility is like a muscle: it grows with practice, feedback and time.”

I assume that means use it or lose it.

“This helps explain why rigid beliefs can turn dangerous. Dogmatism and extremism go hand in hand with low cognitive flexibility and thing that resists correction.”

Oakley wrote much more, but at the end, she concluded that “Only the difficult habit of listening to contrary voices can make our minds—and our democracy—strong enough to endure.”

As I’ve written previously, preservation of our democratic way of life is largely dependent upon our own civic and social self-improvement, especially in the respect we have and appreciation for the merit of contrary points of view.

Taking a Quiz

Doing the quizzes that pop up on Yahoo mail was once enjoyable for me, a pleasant distraction from the day-to-day doldrums’ anxieties. They were also educational. Not anymore. They have been hijacked by the proliferation of very aggravating pop-up ads that cover the content, and blink at nano-second speed, some with flashing lights and flickering messages.

For example, I recently took a History Quiz on William Shakespeare.

Question #1: What was the name of his theater? But first, you should try this tea brewed from the very top of the tea plant. And think about a chill in the night, hot pizza, and an ice-cold Coca-Cola.

Remember the question? Shakespeare’s theater was The Globe constructed in 1599.

Question #2: Where was Shakespeare born? But first, feel the whoa of Listerine. Shop Now. Did you know that snack wrap is back? Have you seen the new Lexus?

Shakespeare was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Question #3: What movie/play in the 1950s was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? But first, make sure you try Collagen Bank SPF Moisturizer from Neutrogena. If you have memory and thinking issues, go to Lilly Direct. And don’t forget to shop for the great buys at Anthropologie.

The play and movie adaptation? West Side Story.

I then reached this question: The first printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays is known as what? The choices were First Folio, Shakespeare’s Quarto, The Complete Works, or Collected Papers.

You’ll have to Google it. I was getting a headache from the ads and called it quits.