Many people feel down after these holidays, most probably due to exhaustion and over-indulgence, among other things, so it’s a good time for some increased optimism, a feat apparently better promised than done. The word derives from the Latin optimum, meaning “best,” and it’s been around for a long time.…
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This week, we remember the horror of January 6, 2021, the day an angry mob surged into our nation’s Capitol, smashing windows, breaking down doors, brutalizing the police who were trying to guard our sacred Capitol, resulting in nine deaths.…
By keeping its veteran population faceless and nameless, the Cooperstown Village Board has actively chosen to widen divisions and isolate an essential part of its own community. To maintain its idyllic façade, Cooperstown will continue to hide the contributions and sacrifices its community members have made in preserving American democracy.…
The stark reality is that civic education in America has been neglected for decades. According to the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, only a third of adults would pass the civics exam required for U.S. citizenship. Even more alarming, the Annenberg Public Policy Center reports that nearly one-fifth of Americans can't name a single branch of government.…
One aspect of this perennial circus that I would like to see done away with is the placing of signs everywhere—lawns, intersections, buildings, cars, etc. My wife has been a bit grumpy with me because I have insisted that we not place a sign at the bottom of our driveway divulging to all the world our preferred candidate.…
Fellow citizens, exercise your right to vote to preserve your sacred heritage, promote your children’s future and obtain the blessings of liberty we all cherish. To maintain a sense of decency in the United States, rise and vote! Our democracy is at stake.…
While JD Vance may have done well in school, what he definitely added to his Yale Law School class was the diversity of being former military, not from an Ivy League school (the largest source of Yale Law School entrants) and, as he wrote, distinctly not from the middle class. He was, as he put it so eloquently in his book, a “hillbilly.”…
White faces, black faces, yellow faces, what a wonderful pallet of what America is and always has been about, a stewpot of all kinds of people from incredibly diverse backgrounds, all sharing in the joy they feel at the accomplishments of their fellow citizens. This color thing has always puzzled me.…
This annual garlic adventure of mine turns out to be a time to wrestle, without having to pin them down, some of the more worrisome problems we now face “in these United States.” It is easy to ignore unpleasantness; even harder to know what to do about it. As I was hanging up the last of the garlic, I was thinking of W.B. Yeats’ great poem, “The Second Coming.”…
How does our citizenship effect changes in our own political system, so that we can enjoy a fairer, smarter democracy such as our allies have?…
