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BOARD GAME

I first became aware of Venezuela when I was about 6.

I received a board game for Christmas that involved moving cargo from one international port to another. It was a great way to learn about international ports, one of which was Maracaibo, from which the country exports its oil.

Then, of course, when I was a little older, I got Risk. Venezuela is one of the key locations in the game of global conquest, the gateway between North and South America. 

In later years, when I would play with family, my daughter and my brother would constantly battle over the spot, stacking the plastic soldiers in the country and on its borders. If I’m not mistaken, the last Risk winner got a small Venezuelan flag – i think my daughter has it now.

While we’re mentioning Risk, another key location is Greenland, the bridge between North America and Europe. Like Venezuela, it seems like a lot of the action in the game takes place on those two spots.

You would have hoped that grown adults, ranging in age from their 50s to just shy of 80, got their desire for world domination or massive cargo fortunes out of their system by the end of adolescence.

But then again, can you imagine a young Donald Trump playing a board game? Or a game of any kind, other than golf for status seeking? Like the guy in the Sheryl Crow song, Trump’s “never had a day of fun in his whole life.”

A lot has been made about why Trump decided that January 2026 was the time to go after Nicholas Maduro and get the oil he thinks he and his oil executive benefactors deserve. 

He’s trying to distract from the still unreleased Epstein files. He’s trying to distract from Jack Smith’s January 6 testimony before a House committee that puts him squarely at the center of a plot to overturn the 2020 election. He’s trying to distract from the disastrous impact on the economy of his idiotic tariffs. He’s trying to distract from his declining health.

All that stuff about distractions might be worth nothing. Except for one thing.

Real people die.

It’s estimated that 80 died in the attack. Some were Venezuelan military personnel. Some apparently were Cuban advisers, bringing another country into this tussle. And some were civilians who apparently were destroyed in order to save them.

As far as we know, no Americans were killed. It would have been a real botch job if there had been,

In the reaction to the raid, people in both parties have talked about how it’s good Maduro is no longer in power. I’m sick of hearing it.

Yeah, Maduro is a bad guy. So is Vladimir Putin. So is Muhammad Bin Salaam. So is Benjamin Netanyahu. So is Kim Jong Il. 

And so is Donald Trump. If you think he’s any better than Maduro, you’re deceiving yourself. If anything Trump is enabling other bad guys with his recklessness, his contempt for civility and his overwhelming greed.

People in both parties praised the U.S. military for its professionalism. That’s also crap.

The United States military was in about as much danger in the raid on Venezuela as your kid is playing “Call of Duty.” Somebody in Venezuela sold old Maduro and led the CIA and the military to him. 

If you’re a military member who participated in this, ask yourself if you think you warrant the same honor as somebody who defused an IED in Afghanistan or was rescued from a downed  helicopter in Iraq. The Venezuelan raid was like shooting fish in a barrel.

It is not valor to fight someone who hasn’t fired a shot at you. 

That’s something every member of the military needs to keep in mind if stupidity’s reign goes unchecked and the forces of this country are used to capture Greenland. Or Cuba. Or Mexico. Or Canada. Or anywhere else. 

Doing so would be a war crime. You would be accountable to the civilized people of the world. And, if you believe, to your God.

People have lives. They have hopes. They have ambitions. They have love for their families.

They are not chips or squares or blocks or little figures on a game board. They are not incidental. This isn’t Risk or some shipping game.

It’s time for these sugar-hyped manchildren to grow up. Particularly the nearly 80-year-old one in the White House. 

It’s making everyone’s life miserable.

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211°F

It doesn’t seem as if this can go on.

For the better part of the last year – since noon ET on January 20 – the United States has been building toward a rolling boil. The temperature ratcheted up almost every day by some new outrage emanating from a desecrated White House.

Until we got to this point. A new year that starts with a divided – maybe hopelessly – country. Sectional bitterness. Different standards of morality. Disrespect for the humanity of people who aren’t your type.

It has to end in 2026. The problem is how.

Is there some way, any way, to take the temperature down? To lower the gas? To add some cold water to the mix?

Or are there enough people who want it to boil over that it can’t be stopped?

Is this the revolution that people on the right have craved since the 1960s? Is this how we end a representative republic, how we end democracy, how we end the fantasy of a melting pot or mosaic that embraces all who enter?

It can’t stay this way. This nation feels like I imagine Europe felt like in the years before World War I. And all it will take is a spark – an Archduke Ferdinand moment – to set off a cataclysmic conflagration.

Before you think I’m overly pessimistic, let me correct you.

I think we can pull it back. I think the year will see us step away from the turmoil and civil war that some seek with both hands.

But it’s going to take a few strong acts and a little luck. And it’s not going to be painless.

Part of it will be economic. The idiotic tariffs. The surging cost of healthcare thanks to the tax break bill for the wealthiest, The immigration policies that will lead to both higher unemployment and a labor shortage at the same time, which is really hard to do.

And, more importantly, part of it is in our hands.

First, we have to somehow show the MAGA cult why this path leads to American ruin.

In a way, what’s happening at the Kennedy Center – yes, the Kennedy Center – is example A. 

Trump wanted to put his imprimatur on American culture as a way of securing his hold on the public mindset. The problem is he doesn’t understand it – he has no concept of the arts.

Can you imagine him looking at a Hopper or Monet painting and reflecting on what’s portrayed? Can you imagine him watching “Severance” or “Pluribus” or “Hamnet” and having an intelligent discussion on the show or film’s message? Does he know who Charlie Parker or Aaron Copland or Richard Smallwood are, much less any of their work?

So when artists started boycotting the center because he insisted on putting his name on it, he couldn’t fathom that. Don’t they just want to get paid? Everybody has their price, right?

No. That’s not how art works. That’s why I am now the proud owner of digital music by Chuck Rudd, Kristy Lee and The Cookers – and will, in all likelihood, discover new artists whose work I enjoy.

And that’s why you should buy their music, too. Standing up on principle, damn the cost, is hard. Especially in a profession in which you either make a fortune with a hit record or barely make ends meet striving for excellence.

The other message by the other artist withdrawals from the Kennedy Center is that I hope MAGA types enjoy the mediocrity of artists who support Trump. Because they are no longer part of the world in which the best art is created.

They’ve probably felt that way for a while. But the non-MAGAs and the rest of the civilized world are about to create a society that excludes them, that doesn’t care if they buy tickets or not. 

For example, if Greg Gutfeld and Rob Schneider are what they’re left with in the world of comedy, MAGAs might never find anything funny again.

Second, there needs to be a zero-tolerance policy toward discriminatory hate.

Trump’s now on the rampage about Somali immigrants and Americans of Somali descent. He’s been fueled by the fraudulent effort to claim newfound fraud in Minnesota day care centers,  something Gov. Tim Walz already handled.

I’m sick of racial bigotry. I’m sick of gender bias. I’m sick of antisemitism. I’m sick of islamophobia. I’m sick of people claiming religious superiority. 

We all should take a no-tolerance policy toward it. No more winking, or claiming that Grandpa is confused, or our neighbors usually mean well.

Call it out. Don’t support businesses or organizations that demonstrate intolerance.

We’re always afraid to make waves. Make waves.

Finally, vote.

Not just on November 3 when the nation is scheduled to elect a new House, a third of the Senate and more than half of the nation’s governors.

Vote in school board and school budget elections. Vote in library and sanitary district elections. Vote in primaries. Vote in runoffs.

Vote every chance you have to vote.

One of the ways the right wing has ascended is taking seriously elections most Americans dismiss. Local government often seems parochial and contingent on a buddy system in which you’re on the outs if you don’t know the gang. 

Let’s end that. You pay taxes, too. You contribute to these communities in big and small ways. Act like you’re a stakeholder. Because you are – and if people claim it without a fight, they can go on to the next level and propose book bans and citizenship tests.

I don’t know if any of that can stop the boil that American society is headed to. I hope so. We were taught in school that the Civil War was a one-time thing, that no one would ever again seek to dissolve the union.

Donald Trump and the people who have backed him – from Vladimir Putin to Elon Musk to Stephen Miller – don’t care. We – and this republic – are collateral damage to getting what they want.

We don’t have to take it lying down.

Hope it’s a happy, healthy and free 2026 for you, your loved ones and the United States of America, 

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YES, IT’S A BIG DEAL

I was jealous of my New York City friends and family who are able to vote for Zohran Mamdani for mayor.

I’ll get back to that point in a bit. But first, let’s discuss Election Day 2025.

It doesn’t garner near the attention that Election Day 2024 did or even Election Day 2026 will. That’s understandable to an extent. The people on the ballot in a presidential, gubernatorial or congressional race get lots of attention on TV or online.

But this year’s elections – if there is, in fact, an election where you live – are generally local. You might know the town supervisor as the guy who lives a couple of blocks away or the woman whose kid goes to the same school as yours. But they’re not generally prominent figures – people who show up on a screen in your home.

Until they are. Local governments are like farm teams in baseball. Most of the people involved never make it to the big leagues – but generally you become a national or state political figure after winning some smaller race in a community.

For example, I just saw a social media post from U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate Cory Booker. His first election was to a municipal council in Newark, New Jersey, in 1997. Mitch McConnell, the venerable Kentucky senator and former party leader, first won a county executive race in 1977.

And even if these people up for election next week don’t become national names, they potentially affect your life in many ways. 

Councils appropriate money and help determine who gets taxed and by how much. Judges preside over criminal and civil cases or even that speeding ticket you want to fight. Town clerks collect your property tax money and send you the receipts that you need for your IRS filing. The highway superintendent makes assignments for clearing your street after a storm.

So the people who say something like “Well, nobody’s up this year, why do I need to vote?” don’t really understand how our system works. That what happens at the local level is just as important as what happens nationally.

The most prominent races this year are for governor in New Jersey and Virginia. Incumbents are term-limited in both states – a Democrat in New Jersey, a Republican in Virginia. 

The Democratic candidates in both states – Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger – are ahead in pre-election polls, but are hardly shoo-ins. And even if they were, it’s important to send a message to Trump and his ilk that their conduct is unacceptable.

We should be trying to beat him bigly.

There are also mayoral races in many of the nation’s big cities. Including, of course, New York – the race which has dominated political coverage for months.

The leading candidate, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, may be running the best campaign I have seen in my lifetime – and I’ve been a political junkie since I was 5 years old. It is not, as fear-mongering detractors argue, that he is converting gullible millennials into socialist zombies.

What Mamdani does so well is listen. He spent the first part of his campaign figuring out what New Yorkers want – to afford living within in the five boroughs. His proposals, which are more detailed than any I’ve seen in a campaign, get at how he will address costs. Nobody is complaining that he is not specific.

Friends outside New York ask if Mamdani translates to their part of the nation. The answer is not that Georgia or Illinois or Virginia need necessarily embrace his democratic socialism. The answer is that Democrats need to hear what their potential constituents are saying about their problems, then propose solutions that people believe could work.  

It’s a trial-and-error process, not a Mount Olympus process. Making people feel as though they’re invested in their community’s success is how Democrats will re-emerge as the dominant political party – and, in the process, save the United States from the Republican-spearheaded drive toward totalitarianism.

Where I live, northwest of the city in Rockland County, politics are a little bleaker – and very weird.

Rank-and-file Democrats can’t stand the county executive, a former New York City cop named Ed Day. He always seems to run on fear of the city, that we in Rockland don’t ‘share the values” of the Gotham menace.

Which is shorthand for “we don’t have a lot of people of color up here” and we don’t want any more.

For example, Day’s campaign literature – a waste of money, as you’ll see in a bit – talks about how he managed to fight New York City’s effort to ship 400 undocumented immigrants to hotels in the county.

What Day doesn’t say is that those immigrants were shipped to Manhattan by Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas, used as political pawns to make some stupid point. If those clucks wanted to maybe help alleviate a problem of getting overwhelmed by migrants, maybe they would have worked with neighboring areas to relocate the, you know, human beings. 

But expecting DeSantis or Abbott to act in a way consistent with the Christian teachings they boast of heeding is folly. And you can count Ed Day with them.

The biggest problem with Rockland, as I alluded to last week in my post on the No King’s Day event in Nanuet, is that there are few young people here. Young professionals do not want to live in a place where people are looking to ban books in schools and where the only jobs being created are low-wage ones in warehouses.

But the Republicans in Rockland, who attained dominance only within the last decade or so, have figured out how to maintain power. They’ve basically co-opted the Democratic party organization – so much so that there is no Democrat running against Day. (Which makes you wonder why he wasted any money on campaign literature). There is an independent who qualified for the ballot.

I voted for him when I cast my early vote this week. I voted for whatever Democrats were on the ballot for town and county offices – unless they were cross-endorsed by Republicans.

There were three other races in which no Democrat was on the ballot. For highway commissioner, I wrote in my son, who at least has some experience working for the town. For a judgeship, I wrote in a friend who lives in the county (and usually reads this blog). 

When it came to a town judgeship, I was hard pressed to come up with anyone else to write in.

And that’s when I remembered how jealous I was that New York City folk have Mamdani to rally around.

So I wrote him in. 

There are those of you who think that I wasted my vote. You’re entitled to that opinion – let’s face it, he’s not going to beat the Republican woman running unopposed.

But, first, she ain’t going to be elected unanimously. I took care of that.

And, second, I wanted to send a message that I want to see candidates like Mamdani in Rockland who are more receptive to the real needs of the community and less interested in scaring us with New York City bogeymen.

So, back to the first sentence of this: I was jealous. I’m not any more.

Make yourself feel better and do good by your community. Vote in this election and make your voice heard. Even if you write-in Zohran Mamdani.

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DO KIDS WANTS KINGS?

If it accomplished nothing else, last Saturday’s No Kings Day of protests felt good.

An estimated 7 million Americans took time from their Saturday routines to march or gather. There were events in every state, about 2,700 of them in all, and they all seemed peaceful and boisterous.

That’s great. You know it had to put a bug up Trump’s ample rear. And the caterwauling that’s followed – that’s precious: We all got paid by George Soros. We’re all Hamas sympathizers. We hate America. We’re all antifa.

Actually, the antifa part is correct. The millions who marched are unapologetically, uninhibitedly, undeniably anti-fascist. That’s why the hell we were there. People railing against antifa should be taken to the nearest national cemetery – or one where someone in their family is buried – and see the OG. The guys who stormed Normandy and Iwo Jima are the Babe Ruths of antifa.

But one criticism that actually bothers me is that the people protesting are a bunch of aging hippies out of touch with the real America.

Because, at least at the protest I attended in Nanuet, New York, most of the 4,500 people standing alongside New York Route 59 were about my age, 71. Many were older. And there were very few people – other than the organizers – younger than 45.

Now, one reason that might be is that Rockland County, the suburban area where I live, is pretty devoid of younger people. Most of my neighbors are around my age. Most of the people I see in the supermarket or the post office are around my age.

In fact, I’m always a little startled when I go someplace – either in Manhattan or on our recent trip to Seattle – where there are so many people in their 20s and 30s. Other than having to accept that “Too Shy Shy” by Kajagoogoo was an actual song from when I was their age, I find hanging around younger people gives me a lift.

What I worry about is that I didn’t see high school students or young adults in the crowd. The people for whom the battle against totalitarianism is being waged.

Maybe they were busy. Saturday is a day for football games. It’s the day when many young people are working at the Shake Shack or the Panera Bread behind the rally in order to earn money for higher education. Apple picking. Pumpkin carving. Shopping at the outlets.

Or maybe they feel as though this doesn’t affect them. Younger people have a harder time seeing the stakes. They’re not used to this.


We were told by our parents about the Depression and World War II. Our not being able to talk about that first-hand makes the idea of Nazis and fascists abstract or curious to our kids – I can’t explain why so many younger people seem enamored with swastika tattoos. Either that or there’s been another periodic outbreak of one of the world’s oldest diseases, antisemitism.

There are indications that more younger people were drawn to Trump’s 2024 campaign than his past garbage spewing. They were bothered by the high cost of living over the past few years, triggered in large part by the supply chain problems resulting from the pandemic. 

Many were also bothered by the two wars that dragged on last year: Russia vs, Ukraine, Israel vs. Hamas. Death and destruction that the United States seemed powerless to stop.

And there’s this issue with gerontocracy. Everybody’s over 70 – hell, some of the leaders in this country are over 80. When are they going to give up power to another generation that has stopped waiting patiently?

For whatever reason, young people stayed away from Nanuet. And we could have used them.

What I hope younger people are finding out is that Trump is not their friend. He doesn’t even comprehend who they are or what they need. He’s joyless, artless and money-mad. He could care less about anyone other than himself and the toadies who suck up to him.

Trump is never going to be a real king, set upon putting one of his worthless offspring on the American throne. But unless there’s some hidden desire to not go through the rigamarole of elections, he’s looking for something a little more permanent for the rest of his miserable life.

I might be dead wrong about this. The kids might have marched in the cities where they feel at home. Where they can feel free to wear funny costumes and devise clever signs. Where this is all fast becoming a matter of quality of life – and even life-and-death for some of the people they care about.

And the younger people who are hip to Trump’s jive seem to be doing the best job fighting the tyranny of Trump’s slow-moving coup.

They instinctively know when to pull out the iPhone or Galaxy to record atrocities in neighborhoods and on city streets. They’re better equipped to throw their bodies in front of masked secret police in Chinatown and on State Street.

It would be nice to have millennials, Gen-Z and Gen Alpha on our side. This fight needs the generations that love Taylor Swift as much as it needs the generations that love James Taylor.

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SAY “AAAH!”

This government shutdown droning on for most of the past month focuses on healthcare.

Democrats say the budget outline bill passed by Republicans earlier this year supercharges price increases for insurance. The Republicans say they are cutting waste and showing that the Affordable Care Act – what everyone knows as Obamacare – is a failure.

Many of us have already received the proposed monthly rates for 2026 coverage. They aren’t pretty. I’m on Medicare, with much lower costs than people below age 65, and my rates are doubling – with less overall coverage. 

If I’m a younger person paying multiples of what I do, I imagine being terrified by what I’m looking at. To the extent that it might cross my mind to forego coverage – a disaster in the making if something terrible happens, as it does too often.

What makes the Republican stance particularly intriguing is that, by all indications, the clamoring for repealing Obamacare that immediately followed its enactment has just about vanished. It was unpopular at first due largely to a mistake Obama made in selling the program – that nothing about your healthcare would change and that you could keep the doctors you wanted.

But there were doctors and insurers who didn’t want to go along. And a lot of people did – and continue to need to – change doctors, dentists and other healthcare professionals.

We’ve gotten used to that. In the end, being able to afford being well supersedes whether or not you can talk to your doctor about how the Mets did this year.

In the process, millions of people who didn’t have healthcare got it. Obamacare’s popularity has soared in the 15 years it has been in existence. So much so that John McCain might have been trying to save his own party when he did his famous thumbs-down that stymied one of umpteen Republican efforts to kill the ACA.

One funny thing about Obamacare is that its origin story is Republican. It’s fairly similar to the healthcare program in Massachusetts shepherded by Mitt Romney when he was governor. The ideas of using the existing insurance market and mandating coverage came from him.

But here’s where this all gets weird if you look at it from a less-partisan point of view. Did Republicans turn vehemently against Obamacare because they seriously don’t believe in providing protection against rising healthcare costs, or did they do so because Obama adopted their idea?

What they’ve said is that they want to “repeal and replace” the ACA. They have never, in 15 years, told us what they would replace it with, only that “repeal” would come before “replace.”

It’s reached the point of laughable – in the debate with Kamala Harris, Trump said he had “concepts” of a plan.

You would think, after 15 years, if Obamacare was so godawful terrible, that plan would be beautifully fine turned, with input from conservative thinktanks that would address the supposed flaws.

And then, if Democrats were true to their mission of providing quality healthcare at lower costs, they would seriously consider the GOP plan and adopt those parts that they believe would work.

It’s just that the Republicans don’t have that plan. They haven’t told us what Trump’s “concepts” are.

Instead, they’ve blamed all the problems facing America’s middle and working classes on desperate people fleeing economic and/or political terror in countries throughout the world. Also known as: They’re coming here to take our jobs and get stuff for nothing.

In a way, I hope these premium hikes people are getting in the mail or online might help put this problem into real perspective. The government shutdown is already bringing pain to the nation and its economy – and that’s only going to get worse as it drags on.

But, as Jon Stewart pointed out on his show last week, fighting to keep healthcare affordable is the very least an out-of-power Democratic Party can do for its constituents – actually, given how Trump voters will be disproportionately hurt by this, what it can do for the whole country.

It would be nice if the United States had a political system that worked to solve real problems, not manufactured ones. 

But instead, we fight viciously over what is actually a problem – and that’s a disaster in the making. And we get caught up in nonsense – did Katie Porter yell at an interviewer in California, is Bad Bunny really an American, will Zohran Mamdani impose Sharia law on Brooklyn?

When the healthcare debates started, I was on board with a single-payer system. I would be willing to pay more in taxes if it meant I never had to worry about getting sick and going into deep debt. Obamacare was a way to get some of what I wanted and, as its namesake likes to say, good is not the enemy of perfect. 

If some principled conservative has a way to make healthcare more available and cheaper, I’m ready to listen.

Otherwise, leave what’s working alone, rescind the tax cuts that wipe out healthcare subsidies, and get this country open again.

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¿DÓNDE ESTÁ MI HERMANO?

When I was in the fourth grade, our teacher tried to teach us Spanish.

It was unusual then to teach elementary school students a foreign language. But that might be the best time to do it.

That’s because I still remember the sentence atop this piece, more than 60 years later. And I cannot tell you what Italian word I supposedly learned this morning on Duolingo.

Hispanic language, culture and overall presence weren’t quite as noticeable in my world in 1963 as they are today. I don’t remember tacos, much less taco trucks. Bad Bunny would have been some malevolent cartoon character, not a singer. Signs weren’t in two languages, just English.

Not that there wasn’t any Hispanic influence. “West Side Story” – the musical and the movie – remained fresh on people’s minds, in part because of the incredible music and storytelling.

But when my class got its Spanish lessons, I thought the only place it might come in handy was if I went to Spain one day.

I bring this up because we have entered Hispanic Heritage Month. It seems strange to start a month-long celebration in the middle of September, but that’s because it’s timed to commence with Mexico’s independence celebrations and include those of other countries in our hemisphere.

This must be – at best – a bittersweet celebration. Thousands of Hispanics have been swept off the streets of our country by the new Gestapo, the agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They’ve been sicced on people based pretty much on the fact that they kinda look Hispanic – it seems that whether these folks have documentation or not is inconsequential. 

These agents have been empowered by a miserable president trying to distract the nation from his multiple failings as a leader and human being. And they’ve been given license by a Supreme Court that puts privilege over justice and expedience over process – the Constitution they’re sworn to interpret fairly reduced to an annoying memo.

In the “again” part of MAGA, a lot of the inference you can draw is that America was a better country when your supermarket cashier didn’t have a Spanish accent, when congas weren’t the drums of street musicians, when the guy who cut your grass was sunburned red instead of brown.

But that’s not how America works. Period. Pizza and hot dogs came from adapting to immigrants from Europe. Jazz came from working in the rhythms of Africa. Our military and public service heroes trace their  origins to every corner of the globe.

I have no Hispanic blood or members of my extended family. It doesn’t matter. These are my people – just as everyone on Team America who abides by the principles of our freedom are my people.

They work in our communities. Their kids go to our schools. They pay their taxes – which is a damn sight more than what too many of these so-called patriots empowering the Republican Party do.

Their culture makes ours more radiant. Their food makes ours taste better. Their bravery and dedication keep us safe. Their happiness reflects well on us.

And that includes those who have come from Central America fleeing authoritarian regimes, gang warfare and crushing poverty – those who couldn’t wait for a documentation system that’s broken and corrupt, geared to let in white South Africans and nobody else.

We should not let spoiled brats like Trump, Homan, Noem and Miller dictate how these people are treated. They have no clue.

I didn’t learn much Spanish. Other than that one sentence in fourth grade, and the Spanish version of the warning on subway cars about not going on the tracks.

But.

¿Dondê esta mi hermano?

Mi hermano estâ aquî. Gracias a dios..

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SETTLERS

Perhaps it’s our nature to believe that, as Pangloss says in “Candide,” “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

Especially for Americans. We’ve been the world’s most prosperous country for a century or so. So we have a standard of living that is pretty high – and certainly much better than those struggling in poor or war-ravaged countries.

So complacency is a default mode. 

The problem with complacency is that it runs into another aspect of nature – aspiration. We want to be better. We want to be the best.

Sometimes that’s not so good. This must be the greediest period I’ve known in my 71 years. Those who have a lot want a whole lot more. A Republican Congress passes a tax bill that disproportionately favors the wealthy. Tesla tries to make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. A CEO grabs a tennis player’s autographed hat from the kid he gave it to.

But more often than not, aspiration is a positive. Staying the same is almost impossible, because time affects everything. But trying to get better, to do better – that is how we make progress and advance society.

Most of the people who have come into this country without documentation didn’t do so to take away American jobs or flout American laws. They did so because of an aspiration to live a better life than one of fear or deprivation in their native country. That aspiration was so strong that they didn’t let the inability of this country to figure out how to let them in legally stop them.

The people of the United States could have responded in kind – double entendre intended. They could have realized that while this country has led the way in exploration and innovation, nothing stays the same. You have to keep growing to stay a leader. 

And the key ingredient to American growth has been taking new ideas from people of different backgrounds and synthesizing them into progress.

So welcoming immigrants has always been in our best interest. 

Unfortunately, that is not the path the plurality of voters chose last November.

And forget complacency. That would be a positive compared to what they voted for.

Regression.

It’s in the phrase. “Make America Great Again.” Implying that America isn’t great now. That the path of inclusion is not the way to a better future. That the restrictions and limitations of the past were a far better way than adapting to changing times.

So you have three paths for what might no longer be the world’s oldest democracy.

— Moving forward. Taking the gift of fresh blood and ideas, and then parlaying them into a stronger, safer, more equitable society.

— Moving backward. Thinking things were better without regard to people who are different from the majority of the country. That the old ways of doing things, that the old rules and laws, that the old ideas about society and science are the path to happiness.

— Complacency. Believing you can fight off change or the reversion to the old norms. Saying things are OK as they are and attempting to weather the storm that’s brewing around us.

There’s a part of me that thinks the plurality of Americans is in the third group.

If we stay quiet, if we don’t encourage but don’t discourage the reactionaries in our midst, they’ll burn themselves out or just get tired. Let’s hang on to what we’ve got.

As if that is what will allow us to keep it.

We’ve become settlers – and not in the pioneer sort of way. We’re ready to settle for what we believe is peace. 

But that’s not how it works.

We shouldn’t want to preserve democracy. We should want to improve it. Abolish the Electoral College. Make it easier to vote. Limit the spending and campaigning so that we’re not so overwhelmed by political ads and social media posts.

We should want to maintain our standard of living. We should want it to grow. We should do what we can to eliminate poverty, hunger and homelessness. We should aspire to new technologies – not just in developing iPhone 17s, but in transportation and medicine. We should make sure our children, elderly and disabled are cared for without straining a family. We should ensure that every one of us is entitled to love who we choose to love and be loved by who chooses to love us.

We should not settle for what we have. We should want more – and we should want it enough so that everybody who wants more gets a fair shot at getting it.

That’s obviously not happening now. Now is the autumn of our discontent.

But before we can fight to end MAGAism and Trumpism, we must know what we want. And what we should want is not for things to stay the same, because they can’t.

It’s September 11, the 24th anniversary of the worst attack on the American homeland that we can remember. Let’s resolve not to be afraid – as we’ve been too often since that sunny day in Manhattan and Virginia –  of adversaries foreign and domestic, the bin Ladens and the Trumps. 

Let’s not settle. Let’s strive to be better.

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DE MORTUIS NIL NISI BONUM. EXCEPT…

James Dobson died last week – and if you didn’t hear the news about that, it might be because the cheering drowned it out.

Not a lot of people in my circle of acquaintances know anything about Dobson, which is something worth discussing in itself.  If you didn’t, Dobson was an evangelical author and the founder of such fundamentalist organizations as the Family Research Council and the radio program “Focus on the Family.”

The short way of describing Dobson is that everything you loathe about Christian fundamentalism in contained in the works and words of Dobson:

The school children murdered at Sandy Hook were God’s retribution for homosexuality.

Women in a marriage consent to sexual activity in exchange for the protection provided by a man. 

Girls speak twice as many words a day as boys.

And the only way to get a child to behave the way you want is through painful punishment.

Dobson spread this stuff, Family Research Council claims, to 200 million people around the world. It was his way of combatting what he perceived to be the permissiveness that was swept into society beginning in the 1960s.

He was MAGA brainwashing before Trump’s ascent. He was the anti-Dr. Spock.

A persistent theme in the social media posts about Dobson’s death is the idea that his philosophies and teachings are the reasons adult kids have nothing to do with their parents.

Among the more common phrases on the Bluesky site: “rot in hell,” “rest in piss,” “good riddance.”

I found out about Dobson during the early days of the Internet when I tried to start a parenting news website called Raisin. I kept seeing press releases from Family Research Council and its mouthpiecs. Gary Bauer, a former Reagan administration official who tried to run for president in 2000 and got less than 1% of the vote in the New Hampshire Republican primary.

So that’s how I became acquainted with their extreme ideology.

As I said, most of the people I know have any idea about any of this. They’re not evangelicals and they certainly would be more apt to follow trained child psychologists’ advice about how to raise their kids. 

My friends and acquaintances would be horrified by the thought that their children might be afraid of them. Their operating theory is that a child is conceived in love – and that’s the guiding principle in their upbringing.

So think about it. There’s an America where Mr. Rogers, Elmo and Arthur are the heroes. There’s another where a wooden implement is the dominant force.

It might explain what’s at the root of our super divided society. The old ways of doing things vs. the thought out way of doing things. If you can see a “Make America Great Again” philosophy in this retro view, it’s understandable.

To the point that there was actual glee in Dobson’s death at age 89.

The Romans believed that of the dead, you should speak nothing but good. To which actress Bette Davis, when hearing about the death of rival Joan Crawford, supposedly said “You should never say bad things about the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”

It seems cruel to pick on dead people. I get it.

But there’s a reason the Munchkins sing “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead” when Dorothy plops the farmhouse on the Wicked Witch of the East. Some bad stuff was going down in Oz, and until her demise, the Munchkins were suffering.

It’s a little more serious here. Thousands of adults who are troubled or estranged from their parents are wishing that some god really did strike people down with lightning. it was just too late when it came to Dobson.

The lessons I take away are twofold.

One, I think I’m OK, but I really hope I have lived my life in a way that my passing is not reason for anyone to celebrate.

Two, I can think of at least one person who’s a constant presence in our lives these days whose death might be celebrated more than Dobson’s. I, for one, have Champagne on ice for that one.

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MIXED UP

Anyone who thinks winning the lottery is the ultimate success isn’t married to someone they love.

Somehow, I think the odds are longer. There are more than 8 billion people on this planet. Out of them, I found the one. 

There are two reasons I bring this up. 

One is that last week was the 40th anniversary of our engagement. I’d like to say that I did something wonderful for the occasion. But, honestly, I’d forgotten the occasion when I exchanged an unused Met game ticket for the contest that night. So much for being sentimental (for those irate about this, rest assured the Mets lost.)

The other reason is the resurfacing of comments by Indiana Gov. Mike Braun. Three years ago, when he was a senator, he told inquiring reporters that the Supreme Court should leave the matter of interracial marriage to the states. It was taken – I wonder why – as an indication he’s not crazy about the idea. Soon after, he backtracked and said he didn’t understand the question and opposes all forms of racism.

That’s nice.

I suspect this remark resurfaced in light of a lot of Trump-inspired opprobrium about people who aren’t white. WItness the occupation of Washington, D.C., by red-state national guardsmen, the effort to gerrymander non-white representatives out of office and even Trump’s attempt to tell us that slavery got a bad rap that caused that no-big-deal Civil War.

My relationship – hey, my marriage – is interracial. Being different races isn’t the reason we’re married, just as being different races wasn’t a reason not to marry. It’s just that the one in 8 billion people I fell in love with happened to be from the other side of the world.

The side benefits of interracial marriage are amazing. I’ve been exposed to cultural experiences I never would have seen. My kids – who, like every offspring of interracial parents I’ve seen, are gorgeous – can tell the difference between good-and-bad dan tats and cannoli.

If there’s a minus, it’s that other people sometimes seem bothered by it. 

We’ve gotten fisheyes from department store clerks in Florida, cab drivers in Hong Kong, waiters in a Brooklyn restaurant. My kids didn’t tell me until they were grown up how much antipathy they faced in our mostly white suburb. 

On the other hand, we’ve been blessed with total support and pride from both our extended families. 

Obviously, that isn’t always the case.

Interracial marriage wasn’t completely legal in this country until 1967, when the Supreme Court ended so-called “miscegenation” laws via the case of the Lovings of Virginia – a Black woman and white man who married. That ruling voided those laws everywhere, although it took until 2000 – 14 years into our marriage – for the last state to do so.

Most laws against interracial marriage focused on Black and white couples. Especially Black man-white woman couples that caused nightmares for those who combined racism and sexism. But there was also hostility toward all other kinds of combinations – any mix of white, Black, Latino, Asian and Indigenous people (and, of course, any mix of sexual orientation involved, but that’s a topic for another time).

When I was born, less than 5% of Americans supported interracial marriage. Even when the Loving decision came, a majority opposed the idea. Shortly after we married, it turned – more Americans supported interracial marriage than opposed it. ( I don’t think we had anything to do with it, but who knows?)

In the last Gallup survey taken four years ago, 94% of Americans approved an interracial marriage – just about a complete reversal of the percentages from the 1950s. About 1 in 5 American marriages are multiracial.

It’s a wonderful thing to see.

All kinds of combinations sitting in the stands at Citi Field, walking with their families at Disney World, attending a Beyonce concert in Los Angeles, running to a gate at O’Hare.

It also seems to drive some people crazy.

Part of what we’re seeing from Trump and the MAGA creeps is an attempt to reestablish “racial purity.” Whites with whites. Other races with their own, in a diminished stature.

It seems to make them nuts – not that they need much to achieve that – to see multiracial kids and not know whether to treat them as white or whatever other race they are. How can you profile people if they’re not exactly the ones you want to profile?

The fact is interracial marriage is contributing to what makes America truly great – the idea that we are committed to the important principles of love and inclusion. Interracial marriage has given us Barack Obama, Derek Jeter, Alicia Keys and The Rock.

It doesn’t matter if you’re the same race. It doesn’t matter if you’re a mix of two or more races. 

It matters what you bring to the American table, what you contribute to make this a better country, and whether or not the person you love is that one in 8 billion you dream of finding.

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HOW MANY SIT-UPS CAN YOU DO IN TWO MINUTES?

The people with whom I went to high school would be floored to learn that, in my 71 years, I’ve run two New York City Marathons and more 10K and 5K races than I can remember.

They would be floored because I was not – shall we say – physically fit when I was a teenager. 

I was heavy. That’s the kind word. There are lots of reasons why. But as much as my heart saw myself as athletic, my body never cooperated.

When I went off to college and then after I graduated, I saw the advantages of working out. One day, on a beach vacation to Rhode Island, I started running. I did that on and off into my late 60s. When I tore my meniscus hiking and developed arthritis, I switched to a stationary bike – although I am thinking about making my first run as a 70-year-old in the next few weeks.

The reason I mention all this is that there is nothing about what one of the women instructors on my Peleton calls my “fitness journey” that has anything to do with having taken physical education classes in school.

And so when Trump, in one of his efforts to bring back the tried-and-truly-useless of the past, declared last week that he wants the Presidential Fitness Test returned to the nation’s schools, it sounds about right.

He hasn’t the slightest clue what it would take to help our nation’s kids live healthier lives.

The Presidential Fitness Test, for those who forgot, was this four-part event that your whole gym class did. It consisted of sit-ups, squat thrusts, straddling some lines and running a lap around the school track.

The point supposedly was to show how fit you were compared not only to your classmates, but to other kids around the country.

The test was one of the stupid things about physical education in elementary and secondary schools.

Gym classes are mandatory because, supposedly, they instill the notion that kids should be fit.

But what they do is completely ridiculous.

For kids who are would-be athletes, wanting to compete in interscholastic sports, they’re 45-50 minutes of beating their chest and showing how strong, fast or whatever they are.

But for kids who need help in getting healthy, they’re a waste of time at best and, often, a chance to be humiliated or bullied.

There is no effort – none – to help kids in need find a program that will help them improve their physical well-being. 

The test that Trump wants to reinstitute is about competition and superiority. He panders to bullies because he is one – and this gives them another chance to show off.

Most kids don’t need any more of that. They need to be encouraged to do healthy things. They need someone to ask them what kinds of things they’re comfortable with doing. They need to start slowly and build a love of physical activity as a way to get in touch with themselves and the world around them.

I’ve run races in my home of New York, in Florida and California and even London. Not once did I think about something that happened in a gym class that was about conforming to the rules and competing against the school jocks.

Not once was I made to feel useless, even though I came nowhere close to winning a race. As opposed to when I couldn’t do a forward roll, swing off the rings or wrestle a state champion almost 100 pounds lighter than me,

And yet, I’m willing to wager that I’m in a better place physically than 90% of the people in my gym class because I enjoy exercising.

President Barack Obama got rid of the Presidential Fitness Test because it was a complete waste of time and unhelpful. 

Just like Trump.

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