Ahoy!

January 22, 2018 By this point in the calendar, the Holidays have faded from the rear-view mirror of memory. The first three-day weekend of the year has paid tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and given everyone a brief “whew”: an extra day to digest the reality of 2018.   By now, meetings are being set for the months ahead, and ads for Memorial Day will soon start appearing. We are solidly in the midst of an annus novus.  We humans need time to let reality sink in. The reality of 2018 took three weeks to settle over me – in part due to a nasty flu which descended upon my body and my sinuses on new year’s eve. The reality of Donald Trump: that has taken a year. This morning as I awoke with the dawn, for the first time in weeks, my flu seemed to be in retreat. The reality of Donald Trump: not so much. In the previous year, there has been much made about “normalizing” Donald Trump,   as if somehow accepting the reality of his existence is to make him normal. I ...

The Day After November 8, 2017 By David Perry, A year ago, I went to bed assured that I would awake to a Democratic President: a woman, a progressive – not him. I was wrong. I was complacent. We all were. The NY Times (complete with graphics)   told us that “Hillary Clinton has a 90% chance of winning the Presidency!” That wasn’t helpful. Trump won, and for the last year, sales of antacid tablets soared (as did bar tabs) and many a TV bore the brunt of heel marks from shoes thrown at screens every time “he” appeared. Of course, “he” appeared A LOT. Escaping “him” was impossible. Until last night. A year ago, I went to bed cocky, spoiled, entitled, gay-and-legally-married and feeling a bit superior: A Black president, now a woman! Soon, aliens from another planet will come and welcome us into the great kumbaya of extraterrestrial togetherness! I was wrong. Here on earth, the “elites” and the know-it-all-know-nothings lost to the “just say nos” of the last eig...

A Summer Without Trump (kinda) by David Perry Well….he’s still here. When my husband and I left the United States in late June for a summer working abroad, I made myself a promise:  NO TRUMP.  Eschewing all social media and reading only non-American news, I had hoped to gain not only a greater insight into my own country, but also to hear how Europeans felt about the United States and its new president.  It worked – for a while. It worked – until Charlottesville. As a native Virginian, for me the weekend of August 11, 2017 was a Trump too far.  For four days, I fell into the rancid rabbit hole of news from that hideous event: Nazis, KKK, an innocent young woman mowed down by a car, the President of the United States equating proactive racism with reactive protest. I wrote an editorial. It was published several places.  Ditto for hundreds, if not thousands – millions of others – around the globe, crying out in Facebooked outrage and Twittered angst over th...