Columbine

Hello Friends,

I found this lovely columbine in a botanical park in Seattle during the spring last year. Interestingly columbines have been assigned many meanings, including foolishness, innocence, little doves, seven gifts of the holy spirit and protector against evil. They also serves as a symbol of fortitude, and it's sometimes given as a gift to provide courage and endurance in one's endeavors.

In today's troubling times we all could use courage and endurance. We have a rogue president who claims he has a mandate to remake the America we grew up to cherish into his own vision of an imaginary time from the past.

He campaigned on a promise to lower prices, but due to his tariffs and lack of understanding or concern for market forces the opposite is happening.

He's put into positions of power a large number of politicians who lost elections because of their extreme positions and fealty to him.

He's made a mockery of science, which will make it harder for us to fight known and future infectious diseases, predict the weather, and provide other services that benefit us all.

He's put his biggest campaign donor in an vague unofficial position to ransack all our government agencies making them ineffective.

He's making it harder for seniors to access the Social Security Administration by cutting off phone service, closing many offices, reducing staff, and requiring helpless older people to appear in person in the remaining short staffed offices.

He's blocked funds appropriated by Congress to provide aid in other countries, and in the process has hurt many farmers and businesses in this country by cancelling orders. Effectively he's running our country much the same way he ran his own businesses into the ground.

He's cut off the distribution of food to food banks which feed those in need and at risk of starving.

He's greatly reducing staffing and benefits to veterans, weakened our military by shaking up and firing its leaders, shut down our intellegence gathering of foreign adversaries, and weakened oversight of our elections and infrastructure security.

Far from protecting our First Amendment freedoms, he's stifling speech by by bullying universities, arresting protesters, and suing media companies.

He's abandoned Ukraine and our European allies.

He's arrested, deported and imprisoned hundreds of immigrants without due process, claiming them to be dangerous gang members, when in fact many of them have no criminal records at all.

All this and so much more, all quickly and with abandon to who gets hurt. This must be the Great America he's hoping to achieve. And to what end? It would appear the plan is to weaken America and its institutions so as to make it easier for him to take control and wield total authoritarian power.

It's time to fight back or lose the freedoms we've come to take for granted,

Barry Rothstein

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