Time to Think

  Donald Lame Duck (this blog has been updated)   by Hank Silverberg                "This Land is your land, this land is my land,      From California, to the New York island....     From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters                                                                                      This land was made for you and me!"   That song, which most of us learned in elementary school, is considered a patriotic look at the beauty of America, its' priceless resources and its' promise of democracy.    (Woody Guthrie) But when Woody Guthrie wrote it in 1940, he considered it a counter to the patriotic pre-war fervor of "God Bless America." Guthrie, an un...

A Year That Changed Us Forever   By Hank Silverberg  I went back into the archive of this blog to see what I was writing about a year ago. I expected to find something  profound about 2019 or some big prediction for 2020. It wasn't there.  I'd like to do a blog on the holidays, good times, family and all the usual stuff for late December, but it won't work this year.  (poetryclub.com) Last year at this time my blog was about the meaning of Chanukah, the impact of the Republican tax cut and the large field of candidates for the upcoming presidential election.  I had no way of knowing of course, that a virus was brewing in China that would spread around the world in just a few short months and change the way we all functioned, maybe forever.  If someone asked me to describe 2020 now, I would use one word: hell.  When the clock strikes 11:59 p.m. on December 31st in the United States, it's likely almost half a million people will have died ...

  Founding Fathers, Save Us Again! By Hank Silverberg    You know their names-- James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Roger Sherman, George Mason and 50 other men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 with some ideas about how to make their infant Republic a lot better.  (Madison,thefederalistpapers.org)    It took two years, the intervention of George Washington, and a brilliant P-R campaign by Hamilton called the Federalist Papers to get it done. They argued, they disagreed, but in the end they compromised to create the  U.S. Constitution, authored for the most part by Madison.   It is a remarkable document, made better with Mason's insistence in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was added.  It has kept this country going with some important additions (13th and 14th Amendments) ever since. It  has saved us once again in 2020. These men had a revolutionary idea: create THREE independent branches of government that would ke...

Virus, Vaccines, Votes and News Deserts  By Hank Silverberg    The numbers are staggering. I can't give you an exact toll because the figures will change dramatically between the time I write this and the time you read this.  (Courtesy of  umd.edu)  But I can tell you that as of this writing, 285,000 people have died from the Covid-19 virus, and almost 15 million have been infected by it in the United States alone.    I remain flabbergasted at the number of people who still won't wear masks or social distance, and who still find it necessary to get together at bars or large social gatherings without ANY precautions at all. That includes religious events where uninformed or seemingly uncaring clergy have exposed their flock to death.  With the holiday season in full swing, many people who may have been following the rules for the last 11 months may be letting their guard down.  I don't usually pay attention to comments from so called "cel...