Best
Easter wishes now with spring looking
like it’s finally here. Out and about on this sunny Saturday, the morning before
Easter, I was cheered by seeing a man wearing a t-shirt embossed with something
like a Fox News logo, except its inscription was Faux News.
For
those of us with the good fortune to have been inside the magnificent Notre Dame cathedral, it’s a terrible
shock and tragedy to have seen images of it burning. Just because it had endured
for centuries, we’d simply expected it to always be there.
Trump
has certainly gone over the line in directly and continually attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar, including by falsely linking her to the attack on the twin
towers and endangering her life. But few Democratic office-holders dare go boldly
to her defense for fear of alienating Jewish and pro-Israel voters. Many of us,
myself included, are not fans of Trump’s pal Netanyahu and his policies toward Palestinians. Is that expressing anti-Semitism?
While
many Americans had been hoping that the Mueller
report would definitively nail Donald Trump, allowing us to finally get rid
of him once and for all, it now looks like we’ll have endure and just muddle
along until the end of his term. While he is not revealed in very flattering terms
in the report, his actions apparently could not be proven to have been criminal
beyond a reasonable doubt. We already knew what kind of guy he is, so nothing was
surprising there.
From
the Mueller report, it looks like Trump
had wanted to obstruct justice, he
certainly tried, but was saved from a
Nixonian fate by his own staff, who failed to carry out some of his orders. I agree with Pelosi’s strategy of not perusing impeachment, as it would
only fire up Trump’s base and energize Senate Republicans, exacerbating the
political clashes of the last two years. Better to let the Trump administration die of natural causes.
Meanwhile,
as I work side-by-side, as an interpreter, with therapists treating children for impulsivity and lack of consideration
for others, I can only wish that Donald Trump had been subjected to such
interventions as a child. The role of a president should be to calm the flames
of controversy, not stoke them, and to bring about cooperation, not conflict,
but Trump goes deliberately in the opposite direction and seems to enjoy insulting
and riling people up. It’s too late now for him to learn more socially acceptable
behavior and he does get positive feedback for his tactics from the one-third
of the electorate who seem to vicariously revel in his freedom to lie, denigrate,
cheat, and exhibit cruelty to others without any apparent consequences.
Former
Florida Republican Governor and now Senator Rick Scott is right, that
Trump “is trying to make everybody crazy.” Trump has been doing that for too
long now. He wants a bigger military budget, as he believes that gives him more
control, allowing him to send more troops to the border without interference. Are
rag-tag Central American migrant families the greatest military threat our
country now faces? Unless more Republican office holders dare to step up, some
of them are in danger of losing their seats in 2020 because the nation cannot
continue on this self-destructive path. It’s disheartening that Donald Trump already
has such a huge war chest, mostly from big donors, which he began soliciting the
day he took office, and while he may be stingy about sharing it with other Republican
lawmakers, he needs some of them at his side for his own protection. It’s good
to see at least one declared Republican presidential candidate, former Mass. Governor
William Weld.
Besides
Trump himself, the major obstacle to political reform and renewal right now is Mitch McConnell, a shrewd, relentless,
and villainous Trump partner. He has blocked Senate votes on Democratic measures
and on a Supreme Court candidate and he himself is likely to be reelected in
2020. Because Senate turnover is only 1/3 every 2 years, it will be hard to get
a Democratic majority in the Senate, as happened in the more representative House.
We’d
like see progress in human development--that humankind, as a whole, can learn
from past mistakes. But now, we are experiencing a regression, not only in our own country, but to an extent around
the world. That’s very disheartening for someone like me who has lived so long with
only a few years left, hoping for a better future for all our children and
grandchildren.
A
voting system called IRV (Instant Runoff
Voting), which allows voters to designate a second choice if their
preferred candidate does not get enough votes to win, would have spared us the
debacle of Donald Trump (and perhaps, previously, the presidency of GW Bush) by
allowing those who voted for third-party candidates or who were lukewarm on
Hillary Clinton to designate her as a second choice. IRV is used now in Australia, Ireland, Papua New Guinea, and Maine's
Congressional delegation. Other states could adopt it. It was also used in
parts of North Carolina until 2013, so, it sounds like a workable idea, though
campaigning, vote casting and counting, and announcing final results might be a
bit more complicated and certainly different. There would be resistance, of course,
but I wonder if any organization or political group or candidate is actually promoting
it? And, while we are at it, let’s give full voting rights to us long-suffering
citizens of the District of Columbia
It’s
best that Boeing is delaying the return of the 737 Max, not only to protect the flying public but also for its own
survival, since another crash would be nearly fatal for Boeing and a big blow to
air travel overall.
Since the rumor in Honduras,
just now when I was there, was that going to the US with a child increases the
odds of getting in, it's no surprise that many men are traveling with just one child, though Hispanic fathers ordinarily
don't have major child-care responsibilities. They may believe that their child
will be their ticket to working in the US, where many employers are eager to
hire them for construction and farm work. In fact, arriving with a minor child
does seem to limit detention for both parent and child. The middle of the US,
Trump country, is certainly not "full," as Trump alleges, and has a
short supply of such workers.
Yet deportations continue, including raids on industries that
employ mostly immigrant workers. I happened to tune into a segment of NPR’s “This
American Life,” where an ICE raid on
a small -town meatpacking plant both devastated and rallied the local residents,
most of whom had voted for Trump. Later, in interviews, they said that they had
voted for him because of his promises to get rid of rapists, criminals, and drug
dealers, not local working family men.
Now, on the 20th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting, it is past
time to reconsider US gun laws, and the quirky and relatively recent Supreme
Court decision enshrining the Second Amendment almost as the 11th
Commandment. The Founding Fathers actually never envisioned an armed citizenry
attacking each other or impulsively committing suicide, or, as happened
recently, a 4-year-old firing off a gun and killing his sister. Australia is a case
example of how killings and suicides have plunged since the enactment of
stricter gun laws after a 1996 gun massacre. New Zealand took only 6 days to
enact stricter gun laws after its recent massacre. But now with a Trump and
Republican top-heavy Supreme Court, any modification of US gun laws will be an
uphill battle. No wonder there has been talk by Democrats of expanding Supreme
Court ranks or even of limiting terms. (McConnell’s underhanded tactics to pack
the Court may end up backfiring.) Of course,
with so many guns already in circulation in the US, it would take time for gun culture
and ownership to dissipate.
After a Honduran friend just reported that her car had been stolen, I recalled many
such thefts there. One woman I know had it hijacked by armed men in Teguc, but
she wasn't physically harmed. Another woman had it disappear out of a church
parking lot where armed guards were supposedly on duty. A couple I met had had
their car hijacked in a rural area and had to walk to the nearest town. In all
cases, the car was uninsured, so the owner simply lost it--a big loss because
duties on imported cars are so high. Honduran car owners rarely insure their cars,
because insurance is simply too costly, instead just taking their chances. In
Honduras, you would never leave a car parked out on the street overnight. One
man with a newish car was filling up in daylight at a gas station in the
capital when armed men demanded his car and also asked for a specified amount
of cash. They were not very smart, because when he said he needed to get the
money at a bank, they stayed outside in the car while he went into the bank and
asked employees there to summon the police, who captured the robbers. After
that, he moved out of Tegucigalpa, where he worked, to Santa Lucia, about 25
miles away, and commuted daily to his job where he parked his car in a guarded
lot, left work early, and never filled up again at a city gas station. (Honduras
is also a living laboratory for the NRA contention that widespread firearm ownership
among the citizenry is protective, as the gun death and injury rate there are
through the roof despite widespread gun ownership.}
I’ve previously mentioned that a child I see as
an interpreter was born after 26 weeks of pregnancy and is making good progress
in therapy. Now I’ve seen one born after only 25 weeks who is doing even better and doesn’t even need any more intervention.
So contact with these children, who may have been born with initial delays or minor
deficits due to their very premature births, has made me less willing to
support late-term abortion and to be concerned about how, exactly, an abortion
at that stage would be carried out. Would it use a type of painless euthanasia?
A woman recently revealed on-line that she had decided to have an abortion at
36 weeks because the unborn had an anomaly incompatible with life, but she did
not mention how an abortion is actually done at that late stage, I hope
humanely. Obviously, I am struggling with this issue as both an adoptive and a birth parent, because if abortion had been more readily available to their birth
mothers, my adoptive kids might have never been born.
To the extent I can recall dreams
right after awakening, I am puzzled
by remembering my surprise, while still back in the dream, at something another
person in the dream had said or done, or by my having been tricked or misled by
someone else in dreamland when, actually, after awakening, I realize that I,
and I alone, am the only source of all the drama and of everything that every
character in the dream has said or done—that at all times, I have been the
puppet master. So why, in my dream, did another personage (an alter ego?) say
and do things that seemed to surprise or shock the “me” of the dream? Maybe a
psychologist could explain that.
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