7/2/2025

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

D+ 217/149/1298

1949 The State of Vietnam was internationally recognised, governing the southern half of Vietnam, with Bảo Đại as chief of state

1962 Sam Walton opened his first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas

1964  Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law

1976 Formal reunification of North and South Vietnam

2014 Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was criminally charged with corruption by French prosecutors

In bed by 9, up before 5, lots of pain and other physical problems.  66°, high of 83°, sunny.

Medications, etc.  I'm not sure what to do about keeping track of all the meds.  Not sure what to do about anything, hoping for 'the big one, Elizabeth.'  There are 14 or 15 pills or capsules in my palm, my daily dosages, to which I add a prescription cream for a rash on my leg, another 'shampoo' and cream for a possible fungal infection in my groin which may prefigure a possibly fatal side effect of Jardiance (one of those pills in my hand), a prescription ointment for my eye, plus Bausch and Lomb artificial tears and eye scrubs for dry eyes.

I spent half an hour on the patio this morning, sitting, listening, and staring.  It was a warm, soft morning, with hardly a breeze.  Such breezes as there were were anecdotal, showing up here and there, some high, some low, all seemingly independent, unconnected with the movement of adjacent air, though that doesn't seem possible.  I seem to be getting better at hearing, though not identifying, barely audible bird calls, though this morning it was easy enough to hear and identify the cardinals, robins, and mourning doves.  The Merlin app told me there were also one or more gold finches, house finches, house sparrows, song sparrows, black-capped chickadees, Baltimore orioles, and red-bellied woodpeckers.  There were probably also catbirds, crows, and downy and hairy woodpeckers nearby, but keeping silent.  As I type this in the afternoon, I see a male and female house finch making whoopee atop one of the shepherd's crooks while a red-bellied woodpecker works on the suet cake, a catbird looks on, flicking its tail feathers, and a female goldfinch plucks nesting material from the big cotton ball.

JJA posted a FB reflection by another attorney about Mt. 25: 31-46.  My comment was

Those words from Matthew strike me as being the heart and soul of Christianity, the religion I was raised in and have struggled with all my life. The basic teachings seem so clear: love, forgiveness, compassion, kindness, empathy, humility. If America is a Christian nation, what does that say about Christianity? If we are made in the image of God, what does that say about God?

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I posted a FB reflection:

 I remember when I was a child

     -my father returned from World War II with PTSD, though it wasn't called that then.  He drank too much beer and he lived with for years with nightmares, terrible memories, and a troubled soul.  We lived for years with his suffering, much of which stayed with him for the rest of his life.

    -my mother went to work waiting on tables at a local coffee shop (though we didn't call them that then)  so we would have enough cash from her tips (nickels, dimes, and quarters) to pay the rent on tiny 3 room basement apartment, buy food, and pay the $1.50 per month tuition at St. Leo the Great Grammar School.  She later moved up in the food service business and eventually graduated to a factory job with steady pay and benefits, but for years, the family survived on her tips.

    - my parents didn't have any credit cards.  They bought clothes through a "factor" named Dave  Fein, who had an account at a big clothing store on Roosevelt Road in Chicago.  They bought on Dave's account.  He was their living, breathing credit card.  Dave came around door to door to collect small amounts on his customers' accounts, keeping his records in the thick account book he always carried. In weeks when we had no money to pay him, we stayed quiet and out of sight until he moved on to his next customer's home.  It was embarrassing, even then.

    -my parents didn't have a checking account.  They paid their utility and other bills with money orders from a neighborhood "currency exchange."  I remember when they finally had enough income to open their first checking account, and I wasn't sent on trips to the currency exchange.

    -my parents sometimes didn't have enough cash to buy food at the local National Food Store so we bought what we could (lunchmeat, canned goods, bread, milk) from our neighbors, Mr. & Mrs. Kelly, who owned a little Mom & Pop grocery store where we had credit.  They were able to send their daughter to college on their earnings from that small Mom & Pop store.

   - my parents told me that they had voted in 1948 for Harry Truman for president because Tom Dewey and the Republicans were for rich people and businessmen, not for 'the little guy,' or people like us.

    -my parents', my little sister's, and my living in the all-White Englewood neighborhood in Chicago, until, despite our Catholic pastor's urging everyone to "keep the undesirables out," a Black family moved in and (was it really overnight?), the neighborhood became all Black.

    -my nuns at St. Leo Grammar School conducting atom bomb drills with us schoolchildren and worrying about the godless communists wanting to turn us into atheists and to kill us, and Irish Catholic Senator Joe McCarthy, a graduate of Jesuit Marquette University and its law school, warning us about communist infiltrators everywhere.

Later on, as I moved from childhood into adulthood, I remember the passionate conflict over civil rights, racial segregation and integration, and over the war in Vietnam, in which I would end up a participant.  I lived through the heartache of John Kennedy's assassination and the passions of Watergate.  America and I have lived through much since I was born on the eve of America's entry into World War II, and much of it was troubling, disheartening, and bad.  That said, I believe I can truthfully say that I have never been so troubled, disheartened, or less hopeful over what is happening in America as I am today under Donald J. Trump and the electorate who voted for him, knowing his character.

Howard Schoenfeld

I think many of us who lived through the ’60s and the aftermath share your trepidation about the state of the world today

Charles D. Clausen

Howard Schoenfeld It's hard to forget the rancor and real hatred of those years, the riots, the demonstrations, the bombings, divided families, flights to Canada, Chicago 68, etc., but, for all that, the country was moving generally in a more humane direction: greater protection of long-abused minorities, hostility to war, greater worker and environmental protection, even under Nixon (Clean Water, Clean Air, OSHA, etc.) We're moving in opposite directions now, other than arguably re war, and who can be sure of that?

 It must be something about this date: here's my entry from a year ago:

 America's long downward spiral.  It seems to me America has been going downhill ever since my childhood and the euphoric years after WWII and the victories over Germany and Japan.  We were the only superpower after the war.  All the other formerly powerful nations were spent by the war: the Axis powers, England, and France.  China was undergoing its communist revolution.  Russia was bled dry by the war, with millions of its citizens killed.  We were the king of the world in the late 40s.

Then, in the 1950s, we moved into the Cold War and fear of the communists, mainly in Russia but also in China.  We got the John Birch Society, HUAC, and Joe McCarthy, a communist under every rock, behind every tree, black lists.

In the 1960s, we had assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK, so-called race riots, and most significantly, our ill-advised invasion of Vietnam that would tear the country apart, and tear families apart, and rightly bring the U.S. down in the estimation of the world.  It was when, as LBJ predicted, the South abandoned the Democrats and became Deep Red Republican.

The 60s brought us Nixon and Kissinger and the 1970s with our invasion of Cambodia, Kent State, the coup against the democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chili, CIA interventions in Central America, Watergate and Nixon's resignation, Attorney General John Mitchell and other going to prison, the Iran Hostage Crisis, the rejection of Jimmy Carter and the election of Ronald Reagan.

The 80s started the electorate and the nation's turn to the Right under Reagan, a trend that would ultimately take us to where we are now with the Trump cult.  It was the era of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ollie North and Fawn Hall shredding so many documents that kept jamming the shredders so Fawn Hall secreted documents in her boots and clothing to keep them from investigators.  It was the era when the Right-Left divide became deeper and more bitter.

The 90s brought us Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinski, the blue dress, and impeachment and, perhaps most destructively, Newt Gingrich, the great nastiness he introduced into domestic politics, and the further deepening of the Right-Left, Red-Blue polarization.  The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting brought us Rush Limbaugh and AM talk radio

The 00s brought us "W," Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, 9/11, the start of the 20 year war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses (WMD, yellow cake uranium), renditions, black prisons, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, waterboarding and "enhanced interrogation" and of course the Financial Collapse of 2008 and the Gread Recession bailouts for the Wall Street and foreclosures for the rest of us.

The teens brought us the backlash to the election of Obama, our first Black president, with the election of Donald Trump and all that has led to since his 2015 ride down the escalator behind Dragon Lady.  Two impeachments, Covid-19, the 2020 election of Biden, the "Big Lie, and January 6th and all that has ensued.

Meanwhile, as a seemingly constant background to all the above, we have had mass shootings in schools, churches, and other places, ever-growing income and wealth inequalities, police shootings of unarmed Black men, and persistent problems attributable to class, caste, and racism.  And we end up where we are today, faced with a choice between a corrupt and sociopathic Donald Trump and an aged and addled Joe Biden, the best our two major parties have to offer America as 'leader of the Free World.'

And of course, it only got worse on Election Day.

Knock off of Munch's Madonna