Time to Think

Are You "Woke"?                                  #266 By Hank Silverberg  Conservatives and their Republican friends have come up with a new slogan, or should I say, insult.  Anyone or any policy they don't like or disagree with is now "woke," or someone practicing "wokeism."   They failed in their attempt to call those people "far-left-liberals" or "socialists." That didn't stick because the American public was smarter than that. Neither characterization fit the traditional political spectrum charts. So, the right-wing picked up on a phrase sometimes previously used in Black culture and turned "woke" into a dirty word. Dictionaries picked up on the word and provided a definition. But this example from Merriam-Webster goes further in explanation: chiefly US slang 1 :   aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justi...

Spring Break Thoughts                              #265 By Hank Silverberg  I'm on Spring Break this week, so I have been watching a bit of the World Baseball Classic on TV this weekend. It's wonderful to see how America's pastime has grown into a worldwide sport with teams from more 20 countries competing. That's increased from 16 teams in 2017.  Many of those teams have MLB players on their rosters, either born in or with connections to other countries. Many of them play for the Dodgers or the Red Sox or any of the other 28 teams during the MLB season.  It really is a small world. Team USA is loaded with All-Stars, but other teams have lots of talent as well. Xander Bogaerts plays for the Netherlands because he's from Aruba, a Dutch "constituent" country, and former Red Sox Ryan Lavarnway was catching for Israel because he's Jewish.  You probably know about the professional leagues in K...

  When The Right Is So Terribly Wrong                   #264 By Hank Silverberg  We are all in danger. It sounds less threatening than other pieces of legislation being floated in Congress and state legislature's right now, but this one is 100% dangerous.  A bill (SB-1316) has been introduced in Florida (where else?) that would require all bloggers who cover the Governor, his administration or the state legislature, to register with the state. And it would require them to reveal if they are being paid to write the blog and who is paying them to write it.  To anyone who has ever passed a fifth-grade civics class, this is a clear violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but apparently Republican State Representative Jason Brodeur who proposed it, and Republican Governor Ron DeSantis who supports it, aren't smarter than a fifth grader.  The First Amendment could not be clearer in spirit or in actua...

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 ...