Opinion

A federal district court shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline and ordered it drained of oil.

“Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 quote requires no citation for those in my age bracket. These are, in fact, the only words from any inaugural speech over my lifetime that I can recall. Yet when I think about them, I shake my head in wonderment. They are totally out of touch with the 21st century American mind.

The very thought of one unelected judge with a stroke of a pen nullifying law is unconscionable to most Americans but this has become common against the Donald Trump administration blocking the executive function of the government at least 37 times. Before him it was 20 times against Barack Obama. When this happens it is called an injunction, most are delayed for a time and overturned by a higher court.  Consequently, Trump has had to ask for 20 emergency stays from the Supreme Court while these were resolved. No president has had to deal with such unconstitutional judicial overreach.

“American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan,” claims the New York Times.

More controversially, the authors write that U.S. President Donald Trump was briefed on the assessment (he denies it) and the piece’s tag line says that his administration “has been deliberating for months” on how to respond (he says the U.S. intelligence community didn't find the claims credible).

The current worldwide protests against racial injustice and inequality spurred by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 have prompted attacks on individuals who sold and owned slaves and defended the abominable practice of slavery.

It has led to the toppling of statues of Christopher Columbus, English slave trader Edward Colston (1636-1721), and Confederacy president Jefferson Davis, and to efforts to remove the 60-foot-tall statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Va. It has also included assaults on proponents of imperialism, most notably Winston Churchill.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

As Americans, we have all recited the Pledge of Allegiance thousands of times throughout our lives.

In July 1969, three American astronauts landed on the moon. It wasn’t just a great technical triumph, it was a much-needed respite amid social and political chaos.     America was already beset by Vietnam and civil rights struggles. That summer of 1969, things got worse. The nation was shocked by news of a riot after a confrontation between gay rights activists and police outside the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village on June 28. Then came news of the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne in a fatal vehicle accident by an intoxicated Sen. Ted Kennedy in Chappaquiddick, Mass., late-night July 18-19.

“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” — Hubert H. Humphrey, Vice President of the United States