Opinion

Why do so many Americans get their medical advice from politicians? They don’t take their cars to politicians to fix, they don’t take a sick cat to a politician, and I will guarantee you that politicians know as much about sick cats or broken-down cars as they do about medicine.

Giant sequoias come as close to immortality as living organisms can. Many live over a thousand years, an almost unimaginable span of survival in the face of all of nature’s challenges.

Of all the troubling issues that have surfaced in the past year, the idea of private funding of government military operations is close to the top of my list. Specifically, I am talking about a million dollar gift from Tennessee billionaire Willis Johnson to the state of South Dakota to cover the costs of Governor Kristi Noem sending National Guard troops to Texas to help “secure” the U. S. - Mexican border.

July the fourth, 2021. It has been 245 years since the Declaration of Independence which separated us from England and King George III. As Benjamin Franklin was coming out of the Constitutional Convention some years later, a woman asked him, “Mr Franklin, what kind of government have you given us?” “A Republic, madam,” he answered. “If you can keep it.” And since those days we have been involved in a struggle to live up to the words, a more perfect union, establish justice, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity. The United States was born under a dream of a better life for everyone. But over the years we have had to redefine “everyone”?? And what liberty, i.e. freedom, means, and taking care of ALL the people, and ensuring a JUST society. And the whole world has watched us down through ages and copied us and come here to make their home. Because this was America and this was better. There are multitudes of stories of what these people found when they arrived — the struggles, the prejudice, the poverty. It seems before they could really call this home, everybody had to shed a little of their blood in some form to make this dream a reality.