It’s late afternoon, and most of the cars are pulling out of the parking lot behind a nondescript office building in Whippany, New Jersey, as I arrive. Our small group has been gathering here since March, so we know the drill. After some quick greetings, we pop our trunks and unload. There are flags, banners, signs, bungee cords, rolls of tape, noisemakers, and, most important of all, letters. A stack of black, 20-by-30-inch foam boards, each bearing a single white letter, has been carefully prearranged to spell out the day’s message.
Browsing: Opinions
In the aftermath of the U.S. government’s military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it is easy to assume that Iran and the United States will never come to diplomatic terms over Iran’s nuclear future. President Donald Trump reportedly decided to launch the strikes partly because he had become increasingly frustrated with Iran for not responding to the latest proposal for a nuclear deal.
Following Trump’s comment, other less grand assessments of the US strikes have been offered, ranging from “enormous damage” and “severe damage” to the Ayatollah Ali Khomeini’s insistence that “nothing at all” was seriously damaged. Accompanying these assessments of what bombing accomplished are wide-ranging predictions of how badly Iran’s nuclear program has been set back: a few months, several months, several years. All these assessments and predictions obscure a simple fact: Iran still has the human and technical resources to produce a nuclear weapon at some point in the future, and now with greater incentive than ever to do so.
Liberalism is the political and social philosophy that promotes democracy, freedom, civil liberties, and limited government intervention. The goal of Christian Nationalism is to restrict freedom and civil liberties through government intervention. And so Christian Nationalism is fundamentally opposed to Liberalism. In this context, one can understand the hate-filled anti-liberal rhetoric of the Christian right. But it is liberalism’s freedoms that made America a great nation. Restricting freedom diminishes us.
Stupid cannot be fixed!
Since the American Revolutionary War, humanity has endured countless conflicts. Still, America’s so-called “wars” — from Vietnam to Afghanistan — were not wars in the traditional sense, but prolonged and senseless struggles. These missions lacked clarity, achievable goals, and a true understanding of war’s ultimate purpose: to destroy an enemy’s capacity and will to wage war again.
Because you didn’t do what needed to be done.
This action flies in the face of the U.S. government’s lengthy record of humanitarian assistance to people of other nations whose lives had been blighted by war, poverty, and illness. From the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-devastated Europe, to Senator George McGovern’s Food for Peace project to feed the hungry, to massive international public health campaigns to eradicate global diseases, U.S. aid programs have played an important role in alleviating human suffering around the world.
Shouts and cheers, honking horns, people banging on drums. Oshkosh! No kings – at least not today. I’m with my sister and great nephew, attending the nearest national rally, about 20 miles south of their home in Appleton, Wisconsin. I’m up here with them because I’m getting cataract surgery (left eye tomorrow), but what the heck, Saturday is open. Let’s go to the No Kings rally.
Then today, on a morning bike ride, I saw a massive snapper the size of a watermelon, slowly making her way across the asphalt. I got off my bike and paused the podcast I’d been listening to: Peter Beinart’s interview of Israeli journalist Gideon Levy.