Second 'Pulse' in Newark

I attended the opening reception for the current art shows at Solo(s) Project House on Friday evening early. I have preliminarily fixed all the fotos but not yet chosen which to show, resized them, etc., nor written the text of my discussion. So let me discuss now something I saw on the way back to my car.
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I had to park a block and a half away up Broad Street, in the first parking space at City Hall just past Franklin Street. When I approached that corner heading back, I saw an SUV parked just behind my car, and two gentlemen doing something, which turned out to be stocking a dispenser for a new free newspaper. I saw a poster on the dispenser that said "NJ Pulse", so asked what it is, in that the only media "Pulse" I know of around here is the website Newark Pulse, which sends out a weekly events e-newsletter each Tuesday. No relation.

The gent in the suit (a Mr. Baldeo) said the paper started in Paterson, but has now broadened the area it covers. I introduced myself, mentoning my fotoblog, then asked how much it costs. When he said it's free, I asked for a copy, and for his card. He gave me a copy, and said his contact information is on page 2 of the paper, so I started to head out but realized I should ask if he'd pose for a mention in my fotoblog, to which he consented. I then went into my car and saw that he or his helper had put a copy under my right-side windshield wiper, so now I had two. I was going to give one back, but decided I could just leave it somewhere for someone else, as for instance in the newspaper rack at the NCC Pathmark shopping center on Bergen Street.

Here is the front page. Today I looked thru the paper and found some odd things. There's a lot more about Paterson, in which I am little interested, than about Newark. The Newark story about "African Americans" blasting the City Council over Dominicans is a reference to various members of the Council making remarks that honored a Dominican store owner who had been killed. Some non-Dominican blacks in the audience complained that when their own people are killed, they don't get that kind of honor. Let us for the record point out that the bulk of Dominicans ARE black, as Americans view things. The CIA World Factbook says the population is "mixed 73%, white 16%, black 11%"; Wikipedia clarifies that "The multiracial population is primarily a mixture of European and African, but there is as well a significant Taíno [Amerindian] element in the population ... about 90% of the contemporary Dominican population has West African ancestry to varying degrees", but the Dominican culture does not gladly admit to that. In any case, a lot of Newarkers would be appalled, if not puzzled, by one group of blacks complaining that another group of blacks received some attention, given that our mayor and a majority of the Council are black. The entire story struck me as odd, and perhaps exaggerated, exacerbating tensions over what was probably (I wasn't there) a trivial incident.
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Another couple of oddities leapt out at me. A story about Governor Christie appointing an openly gay man to the State Supreme Court referenced antigay comments left by pseudonymous person/s at a YouTube video. And the contact info for Mr. Baldeo appeared below a story that makes the odd and incomprehensible claim that his organization, Christian Heritage U.S., "has authored and passed the first law of its kind that requires the U.S. Government to recognize the Christian Heritage of the United States". Since when does any private organization pass laws that require the U.S. Government to do anything?

Plainly the United States has a culture that is dominantly Christian, and I don't know a single person who denies that. How could we, when our biggest holiday, Christmas, dominates the culture for over a month every year? What we do deny, however, is the idea that non-Christians and nonreligious Americans are somehow less fully American than self-styled American "Christians" — many of whom don't act very Christian toward other people.
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When I met Mr. Baldeo, I thought he was Indian or Pakistani. Now I see that his name is Sirrano Keith Baldeo. I have seen the surname Serrano among Hispanics, and Baldeo looks like it could be Spanish, Italian, or something else descended from Latin. Some Jews (Sephardic) have Latin-form names. Mr. Baldeo would seem Christian. Fine. But it is both inappropriate and inadvisable for a (dark-skinned) member of an ethnic minority to be looking down his nose at religious minorities. Intolerance begets intolerance, and people who play one group off against another — be it "blacks" vs. Dominicans, straight people vs. gay people, or Christians vs. non-Christians and the nonreligious — do us all a disservice. This concludes my Sunday sermon.