Thoughts of a retired physician

Donald Trump showed that his real concern is not reelection in 2020 but avoidance of prosecution for criminal activity when he commuted the sentence of Roger Stone on 10 July 2020. Stone was convicted of lying to protect Trump. The sentence commutation is a bald statement that Trump knows he has committed crimes and he is desperate to put a lid on it. As Mitt Romney noted yesterday, this is “ unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president .” America remains highly polarized politically and there will undoubtedly still be people who support Trump. Their willful ignorance and blindness towards his criminality has left us with a rudderless Executive Branch at precisely the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic is roaring back to life. The federal mismanagement of the pandemic is also because of Trump’s feckless “leadership”. He continues to live in a total bubble regarding COVID-19, where

One of the (perhaps) silver linings in the COVID-19 pandemic and the stay-at-home life is time to read. I have been reading more than usual over the past three months and remain thankful for my own library as well as public libraries. The Amazon Kindle has been great. After finishing a book the other evening, I scrolled through my Kindle library and came upon a book I have read in the past, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 by William Manchester . First published in 1974, I remembered it as a good read and a then-contemporary social history, so I opted to open it and re-read it now. The prologue is titled Rock Bottom and tells the story of the Bonus Army in  1932. If you Google “Bonus Army” you will bring up many links . Basically, World War I veterans were promised in 1924 a bonus, to be paid in 1945. The onset of the Great Depression found many of these men destitute, starving, and desperate. Thousands of them marched to Washington, D.C. to ask the g