Time to Think

In Search of Our Better Angels By Hank Silverberg " We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”--   Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural address, March 4, 1861  (President Lincoln) I thought of Mr. Lincoln’s words a lot this past week. In part, it was because of a great book I am reading: In Search of America , by Jon Meacham. It looks at U.S. history not just through great battles or great men, but through the trials and errors which have swung our politics forward, backward and then forward again. He points out very distinctively that the division our country faces today is a continued struggle we have had si...

The Week Hell Froze Over By Hank Silverberg   Much of the country spent this past week in bone chilling cold. There were record low temperatures in lots of places as the Polar Vortex moved further south than usual. Things were actually frozen over in Hell (Michigan) where the thermometer dropped to minus 5 degrees Fahrenheit,  turning the small town’s   streets and brooks into sheer ice.   (The Polar Vortex courtesy of NASA)  But that is not the only thing that made the country shiver this week. Our President once again showed a total lack of knowledge on Climate Change, which has already begun to have an impact on weather systems in both the winter and summer. While we were shivering, Australians were experiencing their hottest summer with record temperatures as high as 120 degrees. There is science in all this.   Climate Change is making extreme weather patterns more likely. https://www.edf.org/climate/climate-change-and-extreme-wea...

Make America, America Again By Hank Silverberg “Don’t it always seem to go  That you don’t know what you’ve got  'Till it’s gone.  They paved paradise  And put up a parking lot.” --Joni Mitchell America found out over the last month just what life would be like if that government everyone complains about would cease to function. Had the shutdown gone on much longer, millions of people would have been homeless and hungry. Not just government workers, but those who rely on government services or those who work for vendors which do business with the government.   What? You say you don’t get anything from the government? Here’s a list of things we would have quickly been without if the government was totally shut down.    Let’s start with our borders, since security there is what touched off this so-called crisis. (U.S. Coast Guard )  Border patrol agents, Coast Guardsmen and TSA agents were forced to work for no ...

Visuals  By Hank Silverberg (This blog has been updated twice with new information not in my original post) The visual of the week came from Washington, DC, where FBI agents and other federal workers waited on line at a food bank to get help with meals. Many of those employees were working without pay as the government shutdown entered its second month. The shutdown is a perfect example of how politicians have failed us. They focus on who is winning the political battle instead of a compromise solution that both sides could live with.   The President,who has said more than once that he “owned” the shutdown, gets most of the blame for his inability to see past his border wall to a broader solution to illegal immigration.  Congressional Democrats, emboldened by the victory this past November, are flexing their muscles but must come to grips with Republican control of the U.S. Senate. The real villain in all this may be Senate Majority Leader Mitc...

Is The President a Spy? By Hank Silverberg It was hard to find a topic for this week’s edition. The government remains partially shut down and the Washington region and a good  part of the country was covered in snow as the week began. The President was still obstinate about getting his border wall and lying about the justification for it, and a group of 30 Democrats were on a fact finding mission to sunny Puerto Rico that included tickets to a benefit performance of “Hamilton” in San Juan.  I got no inspiration from the Twittersphere where people on both sides were still throwing around inaccurate statistics on illegal immigrants, including claims that the crime rate is up (it’s not, it’s actually down) and that “illegals” commit a disproportionate number of gruesome crimes in this country (totally false-see my previous blog below).   https://hanksilverberg.blogspot.com/2019/01/national-emergency-whatemergency-by.html But one story did strike my fancy. I...