Time to Think

Sad Unnecessary Milestone        #189 By Hank Silverberg  We will reach a sad milestone in the coming week. Sometime, possibly Monday or Tuesday, more people will have died from the Covid-19 pandemic than died in the infamous flu pandemic of 1918.  A century ago, before there were flu vaccines and similar shots for many other illnesses, 670,000 people died from the flu in the United States in just five months.  This week, when there has been a safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine for more than eight months, 668,000 have died from the virus since January of 2020, and  we are averaging about 1,800 deaths A DAY right now.  (For perspective, about 600,000 Americans died in the four years of the Civil War .)  Of course, the population of the country is much bigger now than in 1918, and the deaths have been spread out over 18 months, compared to about five months in 1918, so the impact doesn't seem as great. But this is the 21st century. We hav...

The Power of Propaganda By Hank Silverberg  I have a friend on Facebook who is educated and in general, a nice person. She's a relative of a good friend and we have been communicating over the last few years during much of the Trump Administration. She has totally bought into much of the Republican propaganda that has been raging since 2015. Every time she sees something she thinks is new, she sends me a direct message trying to prove once again that President Biden is bad and Democrats are ruining the country.  The latest one she passed on, though a few months old, is the claim from much of the GOP that a spike in the murder rate in some major American cities is the fault of the Democrats who run those cities, and the only way to fix it is to get rid of them.  Crime has always been a political issue. Richard Nixon used his "law and order" theme to help him win the presidency in 1968 after a particularly violent period in our history that included some anti-war protests a...

Texas Taliban                                             #187 By Hank Silverberg Yes, I know the title above seems a bit harsh. But the new anti-abortion law now on the books in Texas has some harsh provisions that go far beyond any effort to limit abortions.  On its surface, it prohibits abortions as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, which is before most women even know they are pregnant. It will be the strictest anti-abortion law in the country with that alone. But the other half of the law is even more ominous because it has the potential to spread to other types of  prohibitions.  It opens the door for any private citizen to sue abortion providers or ANYONE else who might aid a woman in getting an abortion, such as her parents, doctor, boyfriend, husband or a friend who drives  the pregnant woman to a clinic.  Instead of having the gove...

  Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't    #186 By Hank Silverberg  Much is being written and said this week about Afghanistan. There have been horror stories about the chaotic evacuation of Americans and Afghanis who have worked for the United States over the last 20 years. We have lost another 13 Marines and sailors, young people who are often the best of our future.  It is a bad situation. I am irked by the blame game that is playing out with politicians in Washington and the right-wing media everywhere. So I will put this to the critics in simple terms that even the uneducated and misinformed can understand.  Kabul Airport, Aug 17  (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Taylor Crul) Put yourself in the Oval Office. You are President of the United States and you have inherited a 20-year-old war that has failed to bring peace to a region that never seems to have it. Your predecessor (Donald Trump) has made an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U...

Those Who Forget The Past                                #185 By Hank Silverberg  My blog is a bit late this week, and I apologize for that. After 185 weeks of commentary and thoughts, I missed a deadline.  But maybe that's a good thing. I have been a bit angry about an experience I had in a local antique store last week, and I needed a bit of time to calm down before writing about it.    (One of my display cases) My hobby is collecting political campaign items like buttons, pins, posters and such. I have done it since high school and have a modest collection of seven display cases in my home office. Many of them I collected from various campaigns or events I covered as a reporter. Some of them were gifts from friends and family, and one I actually got off the late Congressman Mo Udall's lapel. He gave it to me on a campaign stop in Connecticut back in 1976 when he had a brief run for the...

  End Of A   Quagmire                                                #184 By Hank Silverberg  There is an eerie sight and sound to what is going on in Afghanistan this week. It's like a flashback to 1975, to a place that used to be called Saigon, and a country called South Vietnam that no longer exists. The United States had fought a long bloody war there to prop up a failed and corrupt government and had pulled out most troops two years earlier. After more than a decade of  military campaigns (between 1961 and 1973) and the deaths of more  than 58,200 American military personnel, we just left. The South Vietnam government fell quickly, and we simply turned our backs and tried to forget about that war. More horrifically, we also tended to forget about the American men and women who came home with physical and emotion scars.   The situ...