On a hillside about a half-mile northeast of the Little Bighorn River in Montana is a cluster of stone markers.The markers are strewn in no order other than to mark the spot where men from the 7th Cavalry fell at the Battle of Little Bighorn June 28, 1876. One marker, roughly situated at the center of the cluster, has a black inscription on it — the marker of George Armstrong Custer.
Though the pace won’t really pick up until the fall, federal election campaigns are well underway. And we’re hearing a lot about a welter of key issues like abortion, immigration, the ethics of the Supreme Court, wars in Europe and the Middle East, and the like. But at a time when candidates should be engaging the electorate on the country’s biggest challenges, here’s something they’re not talking about: The national debt.
In the fury to grab our attention and keep it trained on them, folks have turned to superlatives. Now, I’m not saying superlatives are new. Snake oil salesmen have always relied on hype. What’s new, I would argue, is that superlatives are now regularly heaped upon the mundane and no one bats an eye. For example, have you noticed the trend of late to describe a thing as “a show stopper”?
The buzz over the U.S. Surgeon General’s New York Times op-ed calling for warning labels on social media apps and platforms is an important admission that Big Tech’s products are harming and killing American youth.
And it is still spring. Summer starts June 21 and the ritual continues.
I’ve either been involved in or keeping an eye on American politics for over 60 years now. We’ve faced plenty of tough questions during that time, and though many of them have been resolved and we’ve moved on, some are tenacious — income inequality, racial equity, the ever-ballooning national deficit, climate change. But in all those years, the question I’ve found myself returning to again and again — and that I suppose we’ll never really resolve — is the one Lincoln posed at Gettysburg: Can a nation like ours, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” endure?
So, the time has come, a speech 22 years in the making. I decided I wanted to be a legislator when I was 17 years old. I well remember the first time I revealed that goal. I was on a first date with a young lady. We were waiting at a stop light in downtown Litchfield when I announced my intention. It was our last date.
Until recently, it seemed like you couldn’t turn around without finding a headline lambasting the current Congress as the least productive ever. There was good reason for that, which we’ll get into shortly, but it’s worth noting that they’ve suddenly disappeared. Clearly, that’s because of April’s passage of the foreign aid package that includes significant aid for Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, and Taiwan, and a measure that attempts to force a sale of TikTok.
It is an extraordinary person who will offer up their own life in order for future generations to prosper and live in the land of the free as is the way of our military veterans. I’m humbled every day by the bravery and the courage of our veterans and their families. They deserve all our respect, our support and our admiration. The incredible scope of their sacrifice is unfathomable. It pains me to see the vitriol, the falsehoods, and outrageous behaviors performed in the name of First Amendment freedoms. But that’s exactly what our veterans fought so hard to preserve, our freedoms and our rights.
There is an adage that says, “A woman’s work is never done.” I would guess many people are familiar with it. Perhaps lesser known is the first part of the quote by Jean Little, which reads, “A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.” We can surmise from this quote that life takes work, and often that work is ongoing and repetitive.