John, as always, thanks for your thoughts. I have come to enjoy and respect your insightfulness over the years. I find it interesting (a word I have used a lot since 2016) that Republican congress members voted for the recission package but had trouble with the NPR/PBS portion. This tells me they do like public media but needed to please one person with their vote. I am roughly your age and I have watched over the decades the attack on public media, public education (I still teach), and anything that cost 'precious' tax dollars, like feeding hungry people. What is being undone will either never be redone or will take a lot of time and effort to redo. My hope is that my grandchildren will want to undo as much of this as they can when their turn comes.
One class I currently teach is the Holocaust. History does not repeat itself with the same people and identical actions but there are some stark similarities. But we can go beyond the Holocaust and look at both Stalin's USSR and Mao's China and should come away bothered by what we are seeing now. I am not saying the president is any of these men but there are similarities in the actions being taken in so many arenas. That is why I want to put my hope in my grandchildren's generation. I hope they are up to the task ahead.
John, as always, thanks for your thoughts. I have come to enjoy and respect your insightfulness over the years. I find it interesting (a word I have used a lot since 2016) that Republican congress members voted for the recission package but had trouble with the NPR/PBS portion. This tells me they do like public media but needed to please one person with their vote. I am roughly your age and I have watched over the decades the attack on public media, public education (I still teach), and anything that cost 'precious' tax dollars, like feeding hungry people. What is being undone will either never be redone or will take a lot of time and effort to redo. My hope is that my grandchildren will want to undo as much of this as they can when their turn comes. One class I currently teach is the Holocaust. History does not repeat itself with the same people and identical actions but there are some stark similarities. But we can go beyond the Holocaust and look at both Stalin's USSR and Mao's China and should come away bothered by what we are seeing now. I am not saying the president is any of these men but there are similarities in the actions being taken in so many arenas. That is why I want to put my hope in my grandchildren's generation. I hope they are up to the task ahead.