Browsing: Opinions

   For example, Project 2025 calls for banning public employee unions―unions representing teachers, librarians, firefighters, postal workers, police, clerks, trash collectors, and other public sector workers. As 32.5 percent of public sector employees belong to unions, they constitute the most highly unionized portion of the American workforce. Thus, the abolition of their unions would eliminate nearly half the union membership in the United States.

The boy had been involved in a program to introduce peace circles to schools – moments in the school day when a class sits together and shares their thoughts and feelings around a certain topic. Like other school systems, Pittsburgh had begun this program to help reduce violence by giving students tools for better communication. Happily for this boy and his family, what happened in the classroom didn’t stay in the classroom.

      Since the presidential campaign shake-up in July, the national conversation about manhood is abuzz with talk of a “new” masculinity, embodied by good, decent men like Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff. What’s actually new, though, is what’s now coming into focus: the consequences of years of men’s hard work to redefine manhood.

    Instead, a vain competition for military superiority continues unabated. Looking into that abyss yields a no-win scenario in which “deterrence” keeps us secure—until it doesn’t. Even setting aside nuclear weapons, the suffering of modern wars falls overwhelmingly on civilian populations—in Ukraine, in Palestine and Israel, in Sudan. “Victory” has become a phantom.

       What should not have happened is that hateful people took to the Internet to make fun of Gus. But it did. For example, conservative columnist Ann Coulter wrote on the platform X “Talk about weird.” The comment has since been deleted but that does not erase the despicable sentiment behind making fun of a teenager who expressed his love for his father. Trump supporter and podcaster Mike Crispi referred to Gus as Walz’s “stupid crying son” and wrote on X “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats,” while another Trump support, Alec Lace, who actually hosts a podcast about fatherhood, wrote “Get the kid a tampon already.”

        In the Prologue of “Invisible Man,” the great writer Ralph Ellison schools us that “a hibernation is a covert preperation for a more overt action.” Proof of Ellison’s profundity is Vice President Kamala Harris’s emergence as Donald Trump’s worst nightmare: his opponent for president of the United States of America! The fake orange man is beside himself, acting weird, flailing about with figments of an unhinged mind, while ever smiling and confident Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, draw crowds of 10-15 thousand wherever they campaign across America.

        America never, in its wildest imagination, thought that there would again come a President who would bring the kind of shame and criminality that former President Nixon unleashed in the Oval Office and before this Nation. But here we are again, and it’s far more than putrefied shame and criminality. Republican conservative white nationalist voters elected Donald J. Trump as America’s 45th President. Unfortunately, Trump not only disgraced the Presidency but governed as a criminal-minded delusionist.