Posts by admin

Let me be among the first admirers of Veterans For Peace(VFP) to welcome you home. As the third generation in my family to serve as an officer in the U.S. Army, I was privileged to rejuvenate the Houston Chapter and serve in its leadership for a number of years. I am certain that on your return, your comrades in arms in VFP will provide you a warm welcome and the support you'll need to re-adjust to Tea Party America.

You might have noticed, if you're paying attention, that the U.S. has a major set of medical crises. An epidemic of mass killings from clearly deranged perpetrators who've slipped through the net of the psych/neuro professionals unnoticed. And an epidemic of broken vets returning home from the killing fields with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). . The response from the medical profession (using this term advisedly)? Silence.

Always has been. Or, at least from the day Dick Armey became chair of Citizens For A Sound Economy in 2003. That's Dick Armey, Republican from north Texas. CSE was a pretty nondescript political funding vehicle for the anti-tax movement when founded by the Koch brothers from nearby Kansas in 1984. But Army gave it brainy fire and brimstone, however plain spoken.

The current uproar over wait times and probable malfeasance and maybe criminal cover ups at some VA facilities being investigated has caused a call for privatization of the VA health system. This demand is mostly heard from teabagger Republicans in Congress.

Much is being written and broadcast this week about the U.S.A. celebrating 60 years of school desegregation by way of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. This was the year I graduated from my mostly segregated high school.

Much is being written recently about the appalling status of incarceration rates in the U.S.A. Not much is being done. All sorts of causal factors are cited: the War on Drugs, poverty, moral breakdown, the economy, mental illness, demise of the social contract.....the list is endless.

Tim Carpenter, Co-Founder of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), has died at 55. He suffered terminal cancer but I read he worked up to the very end this week leading PDA. He leaves a huge legacy and both a wife and two daughters to carry on his work.

Residing in my "twilight years", I've been reflecting on the many unresolved issues facing my country and revisiting the ebb and flow of progress/regression in the search for solutions I've witnessed and worked for as an activist over about 45 years of my more than seven decades of life.