Time to Think

Unite What’s Right By Hank Silverberg   There they were again--Nazis, skinheads, white supremacists--standing in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House waving the flag and calling it a “white civil rights movement.” Your first reaction should be, “What?”  For those of you who read this blog on a regular basis, you will find this one a bit different.   It has to be.  For more than 200 years, with some notable exceptions, the white, protestant, elite has ruled America. But the majority of people in America stopped being white years ago. There are hundreds of millions of people who know that and believe it makes us a stronger nation. The folks with the Swastikas and Stars and Bars represent a small minority who don’t get it.  In fact, after all the media coverage and all the rhetoric, only about two dozen people came to the “Unite the Right” rally at Lafayette Park this past Sunday. They were far out numbered by a variety of count...

“Don’t Kill The Messenger” By Hank Silverberg The phase “Don’t kill the messenger” dates back to 441 BC, and is mostly attributed to Sophocles, a Greek philosopher and playwright. In his scenario, a messenger comes from the battlefield bringing the King bad news. The King, enraged by the news, kills the messenger. Shakespeare re-used the concept in both “Henry IV” and “Anthony and Cleopatra.” Today’s primary messenger, of course, is the press, and the man in the White House appears to be acting like an enraged king. America woke up to this tweet on Sunday morning:  Donald J. Trump ( @realDonaldTrump ) 8/5/18, 7:38 AM The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They ca...

The “No Service” Economy By Hank Silverberg For years we’ve been hearing that “Americans don’t make things anymore,” and we have switched over to a “service economy.” That is not totally true. There are still factories in the United States that make everything from nails to solar panels (both hit hard by the Trump tariffs, but that’s for another edition). But it is true that much of our money is spent on health care, the internet, sports and entertainment. We spend a lot on things like doctors, brokers, ISP’s, tourism and streaming. The exception may be the electronics we buy, much of it built overseas.     So, you would think that since we are in a service economy, that A merica would lead the world in customer service. Sorry, no. In fact, a new survey from LinkedIn shows customer service is among the scarcest qualities in workers in general, and especially in the DC region. (We are not including Congress here, which also provides very little customer servic...

The Social Media Trap  By Hank Silverberg You may have connected to this blog through Twitter or Facebook. Maybe you also have an Instagram account or Linked In. Social media has become part of everyday life for millions of Americans. Many of us look at it first thing in the morning or the last thing at night before going to sleep.   But as  Admiral Ackbar said in Return of the Jedi —"IT’S A TRAP”! I could quote studies from sociologists about Internet addiction or recount stories of people whose lives and careers were ruined by something they posted on social media, but I would rather look at the big picture—what it is doing to the way we communicate both personally and professionally, and how that is damaging social discourse.    Twitter and Facebook began as wonderful social tools. I set up my Facebook page more than ten years ago when my children were in college. It was a way of keeping in touch with what they were doing in school and fo...

Under Attack By Hank Silverberg                                           We are under attack!    Our freedom is now threatened, and no one seems to notice. I am not talking about the Russians hacking into our election process. That is also an attack and I may have more to write about that when we know more about President Trump's meeting with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.         The latest skirmish in a two-year-old war that I want to focus on came in London, as Trump held a joint news conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May.   Mr. Trump wouldn’t take a question from CNN’s Jim Acosta, calling the network “fake news.” He jumped to John Roberts of Fox News instead.   Then later on when Kristen Welker of NBC News asked a question, he attacked her and her network because he didn’t like her well-stru...

Self-Evident truths  By Hank Silverberg   “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness ”     Anyone who has graduated high school should recognize those words as the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. But over the last week, it has become clear that much of the Declaration, approved by the Continental Congress over several days in July of 1776, is a mystery to many Americans.        Thomas Jefferson wrote it, borrowing heavily from political philosophers of the time. It was a compromise document with Jefferson changing John Locke’s “life, liberty and property,” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” to broaden the concept and more likely to delay a continued debate over slavery. That would plague the new country for another 87 y...