Time to Think

The Cost of Distorting History                   #263 By Hank Silverberg  (Iwo Jima, 1945) On February 19th, 1945, 78 years ago this week,  my father, Sidney K. Silverberg, was among the 7,000 U.S. Marines who stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima on the first day of a key battle of World War Two. It was a war to defeat fascism and free millions of people from tyranny in Europe and Asia.  This past week, a 28-year-old member of the Fairfax County School Board in Virginia said that month-long battle should never have happened and called it "evil."  What was the reasoning of Abrar Omeish? She said: "Just a few days ago was Japanese Day of Remembrance.   Something for us to certainly reflect on… the days when, you know, Iwo Jima unfortunately happened and set a record for really what, I hate to say, human evil is capable of." Certainly, war as a solution to human conflict can be horrific.  But Japanese...

Ready For Another Presidential Campaign?       #262 By Hank Silverberg  I wrote a novel in 2015 about a fictional political campaign. It has a complex plot about a female vice-president getting ready to challenge an aging president who has health issues. The story centers on the reporters covering the election campaign with some sidebar plot twists that include a terrorist, and dirty tricks.  At the time I wrote it, I thought it was a pretty plausible story, far enough away from reality to make it a fun read without stretching things into bizarre territory.    Then along came the 2016 presidential race, and by the time the novel was first published in 2017, the truth became stranger than my fiction.  But I have hesitated to write a sequel because it could not compete with the unpredictable and destructive nature of real American politics right now.  Let's look at it as if it were the plot to a novel. You have a former defeated president ...

Is There Hope?                                                                    #261 By Hank Silverberg                                                            The scenes out of Turkey and Syria following that massive earthquake and aftershocks are horrific. The death toll has topped 25,000 and may keep going up for days as they continue to dig out the rubble. Unlike war or famine, there really is nothing that can be done to prevent earthquakes, though there is already some indication that buildings in the earthquake-prone areas of the region were not constructed strongly enough to withstand even a modest quake (this one was big at 7.8). What is encouraging thou...

It Is Balloon!                                                       #260      By Hank Silverberg                                                                                                      Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's not Superman. However, it WAS a Chinese spy balloon!  While most of America was suffering from severe cold or nasty ice and power outages this past week, the Republicans in Congress were screaming about a Chinese balloon that was flying over America's heartland, taking pictures and possibly collecting intelligence. Let us not fo...

Outside The Box                         #259   By Hank Silverberg    There are a lot of things in our world right now that are just not right, particularly here in the United States.  Our government is almost dysfunctional. Oh, routine things get done, but new ideas, something that will move society forward, are missing. Sure, we have new technology. Some of it, like Artificial Intelligence, may present some new ethical questions as we progress. But that is for a discussion another day.  What is missing from our country right now, and maybe the whole world, are people who can think outside the box. I mean people who can come up with a different way of doing things.  Here is just a small example I encountered while getting lunch this past Sunday.  While out on errands, I decided to break my diet and get a burger. I am not going to name the fast-food chain, but you have probably b...