Time to Think

A Hundred Days of Hell                    #334 By Hank Silverberg I am starting my blog this week between two games of a double header between my beloved Red Sox and the Cleveland Guardians. I point that out only because it is baseball that has kept me calm for the last few weeks while Donald J. Trump has put me, the entire country, and a big part of the world into hell.  America is not perfect. We have had a few problems to deal with that were not of Trump's making. The war between Ukraine and Russia, the carnage in the Middle East that started with the mass murder of Israelis in October of 2023, and the continuing inability to deal with an illegal immigration that was slowed only by the pandemic.    But before Trump took office on January 20th, our economy was in pretty good shape, having come out of the economic disaster of the the pandemic better than much of the world.  Unemployment was hovering between three and...

Transfer Of Power, Sort Of                                   #333 By Hank Silverberg  The response from the general public over the massive cuts in federal employees and the closing of federal agencies has been growing. But the impact may not have reached down into your neighborhood just yet. Across the country, state legislatures, big city councils, and small town boards are now slowly learning what impact the chaos in Washington may cause on Main Street, USA. And many of those local leaders are struggling with what to do about it.   School budgets now have massive gaps between expenses and local tax revenue. Federal disaster relief is slow in coming and may not come at all,  and programs we all took for granted, like health screening for young children are going away (see below).  You will soon feel the impact.  And if you are not paying attention to how your local ...

Warning Signs                                                                                                        #332 By  Hank Silverberg Over the past few weeks much of the media and a lot of the public have been fixated on tariffs and Donald Trump's effort to turn a good economy into a world-wide depression. What his ultimate plan is, we don't know. In fact, I am among those who think he doesn't really have one.  But while all this was going on, his minions in Congress have been screwing the average American very quickly.  Two bills passed by the House are good examples.  First, there is the SAVE Act (H.R.8281), which requires all individuals to have documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in order to regist...

The Loyal Opposition                                    #331        By Hank Silverberg  I have been watching with great sadness and a bit of anger as the current administration, acting very quickly, has begun to dismantle all the progress in our country has made over the last 50 years. It was clear during the election campaign, and since then many people who supported Donald Trump had no idea what he stood for and what he and his minions were planning to do once they took power.  Now we are all finding out the hard way. Democrats, pretty much shocked and disorganized since last November, have been slow to form a powerful opposition to Trump. They CAN and should reach out to people who voted for Trump who may now finally see how his "downsize the government" and "deport illegal immigrants" is affecting their everyday lives. But here's the problem. Many Trump supporters...

Conspiracy                                                                                         #330 By Hank Silverberg Here we go again with nonsense conspiracy theories. First, there was the release of more documents from the Kennedy assassination and the absolute certainty from some that the documents would detail some kind of conspiracy beyond Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. The CIA? J. Edgar Hoover's FBI? Castro? We have heard this nonsense for decades, and so far no one has found any smoking gun.  Then came Signalgate, as some have started to call it. The screw up by Trump's security experts that allowed battle plans for an attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen to be discussed on an unsecured chat site where a reporter was mysteriously allowed to watch ...

Legacy                                                   #329 By Hank Silverberg This summer there will be events around the country commemorating the 250th birthday of the United States. They won't be as big as the bicentennial celebration in 1976 with tall ships and fireworks and parades and much more, which a large portion of our population can still remember. But we will hear a lot again this summer about our Founding Fathers, the Constitution and history.  As I spent some time this weekend with my grand- children, it made me wonder with all that's going on in the world and in Washington, D.C. right now, what things might be like in the United States for the Tricentennial, 50 years from now.  I won't be here, but my grandchildren will be. In 1976 there were speeches and events to highlight the progress we had made since the Revolution. We weren't per...