The American Revolution would have failed without French help. Their assistance allowed us to form an independent country that would become the world’s first modern democracy. Since the 1770s the situation has reversed: The United States has helped preserve and spread freedom in Europe many times. One hundred and forty years later we enter WWI to save France from German military conquest. We continued to help France, and Europe, throughout the 20th Century. In WWII we led the effort to end Hitler’s domination of Europe, in the 1980s we helped end the Soviet Eastern European empire, and in the 1990s we intervened to stop genocide in Bosnia.
In addition we initiated the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1948 to stop the Soviets from adding western European countries to their empire. The NATO alliance was initially composed of the United States, Canada, and ten western European democracies. The United States has been, and continues to be, disproportionately the major economic and military resource contributor to the alliance; in 2023 sixty eight percent of the total military budget of all 32 NATO was contributed by the United States. In the beginning the European excuse for not contributing more was that their impoverished economies were still recovering from WWII devastation. That excuse lost credibility a long time ago: the European Union is one of the most prosperous economies in the world. As the opening paragraph indicates, Europeans became overly dependent on Americans for the initiative and resources needed to resolve European issues.
Currently the United States is heavily contributing to another European issue: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The United States has contributed the highest percentage of the military resources given to Ukraine to fight the Russians. The Trump administration is unlikely to continue to be the major contributor to Ukraine. The European members of NATO will have a choice: to significantly increase their support of Ukraine, or allow Putin to conquer Ukraine. The Europeans have the economic and military capability- the issue is political will.
Currently political will is lacking. North Korean troops entered the Ukraine war on the Russian side, and so far NATO has not responded to this latest escalation, despite Zelenski’s pleas. Once Trump becomes president and cuts off American support the situation becomes even more dire. Putin has European expansion ambitions. He is a former Soviet KGB official and he wants to reestablish the Soviet Empire. For those who don’t remember or never knew, the Russians controlled Eastern Europe from 1945 through the early 1990s. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia were all under the Russian yoke. Putin doesn’t just want Ukraine; he wants these countries returned to Russian control.
Most of the former Soviet-dominated countries listed above are now democracies and part of NATO. The leaders of these countries understand and fear Putin’s ambitions. Hopefully they can persuade the alliance to fill the resource vacuum created by the withdrawal of American support.
The importance of doing so is not just relevant to Europe- it has relevance for the entire world. The four most potent dictatorships in the world are Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. They have formed an alliance. China, North Korea and Iran are all supporting Russia in the Ukraine war, and in general they are all helping each other. Each country has unfulfilled expansionist desires. They all wish to conquer or destroy other countries. NATO is the only viable alliance of democratic militaries in the world. NATO weakness in Ukraine will be seen as democratic inability to stop dictatorial ambition anywhere in the world.
For the foreseeable future the European countries will have to lead NATO, which essentially means leading the free world. It is a role the United States has played since 1945. Perhaps it is time for a united Europe to assume the free world leadership role.
Mainstream media pundits have had a field day in the past week, but don’t be fooled. Donald Trump did not obtain a giant leap in popular vote support. Those 75,575,000 votes are only 2.2% more than the 72,414,000 in 2020. It’s barely more than 50% of the total. Trump did better with voters in 2020, when he received 4.6% more votes than he had in 2016.
Voters treated this election like the Obama second term contest in 2012: fewer voters trekked to the polls (only 148,042,000, via in person or the dining table). The Biden-Trump election in 2020 reversed that trend and set a record for voters (156,620,000).
So yes, Trump won a second term, like George W. Bush, but with a only slight majority of the popular vote. Both men met this milestone on their second election, not the first. With Bush, more voters went blue in 2004 than 2000. This time the Democratic-leaning voters chose to stay home.
That’s the question of the day: why did so many registered voters abstain from what former Trump officials considered a referendum on an existential threat to democracy?
None of this would be happening if 121,000 people had filled in the little bubble next to Harris’ name instead of Trumps.
Notice the difference in third party votes: in the 20th century, it weakened both the Democratic and Republican parties. In the 21st, the Democratic Party. Ironically, the last name of each affected Democratic candidate was ‘Clinton.’
A word about Reagan
Reagan is given credit for a landslide in 1980 because electoral college maps show results in large geographic units rather than Congressional districts or voting percentages.
Did you realize Reagan received only 50.7% of the popular vote in 1980, only slightly more than Trump’s 50.2% (13 Nov 2024).
I have spent 44 years under the impression that America gave Reagan a sweeping mandate when he defeated Carter.
We did not.
The damage Reagan wrought … culminating in Trump’s presidencies … began with the will of a minuscule majority — less than 1% of the voting populace. Just like Trump.
For both “landslide” misrepresentations, I blame traditional news media.
Reagan’s election in 1980 began with an illegal negotiation with a foreign power (release of Iranian hostages), but that’s for another day. However, Reagan’s shenanigans was not unlike Trump’s invoking “illegals” in his campaign. Trump’s was made possible only because he demanded Republicans reject their own bipartisan border bill. We’ll leave Putin for another day, as well.
What some call a disability may be your greatest asset
by Dan Piraro
“Danny has a problem paying attention and following instructions,” read the damning note scrawled across my report card. My parents lectured me, but…I wasn’t paying attention.
Being different has always been stigmatized. Most of us outside the norm strive to “fit in.” But should we?
I don’t care if he is full of candy, we don’t tolerate bullying at this school.
When kids are physically or mentally different from the average, they are often treated like threats or targets. Bullies abuse them, and adults often want to separate them from the “normal” children. When I was a kid, some were sent to stand in the corner as punishment when their behavior was deemed “disruptive.”
One of my sisters was dyslexic, but that condition wasn’t commonly known when we were young. Only two explanations were considered for children who had trouble reading: stupid or lazy.
My parents didn’t want a “stupid” kid, so they pushed her to try harder at something she was neurologically incapable of doing at that time. They may as well have been imploring her to levitate or speak Mandarin. That made her feel stupid, though she certainly was not.
I wasn’t dyslexic, but when I started school in the mid-1960s, sitting still and paying attention to a teacher was as unavailable to me as space flight. I could pay attention if I was doodling on a piece of paper as I listened, but that went over as well as if I’d tried juggling chainsaws.
I was far behind the other kids in learning to read, too. I was much more fascinated by the shape and design of letters than the sounds of them. Even after I got the hang of converting symbols to sounds, I could read an entire story and have almost no idea what it was about—the alternate stories simultaneously happening in my head demanded more attention.
Adding to my challenges was my family’s Catholicism. Dad had attended Catholic school, and it had toughened him up for Marine boot camp, so he did not want to deny me the same advantage.
My teachers were old-school nuns whose notion of compassion was to refrain from putting their full weight behind the yardstick they were swinging at our knuckles. Our school was connected to a church where my fellow students and I were required to attend mass every single morning, for an entire hour, presented in Latin.
Who brings a yardstick to church? Sister Mary Contusions did.
Sitting still under her watchful eye and listening to a man wearing a decorative shower curtain blather in a foreign language for an hour was torture for a kid like me.
To endure it, I would fall into my mind’s eye and let it wander far and wide. My mental adventures were just enough to get me through six years of five masses per week (and another on Sunday with my family!) without developing split personalities to bear the abuse.
Like many folks who can’t read, I used my wits to hide that I was so far behind the norm, and I found ways to make decent grades without reading the assigned materials.
The older I got, however, the more difficult that charade became.
After a lousy report card in middle school, my father insisted on helping me with my homework. When he saw the doodles all over my notebooks, he chided that I would never amount to anything if I didn’t stop drawing all over my schoolwork. I tried to explain it was the only way I could pay attention, but he was no more convinced than the old-lady nuns had been.
By the time I went to college, it was a lost cause. The assigned reading was too much and I dropped out after one semester.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to read, it was that I could not concentrate on what I was reading. I had to cover the same material over and over to comprehend it.
I lost count of how many lectures I’d heard on applying myself, but “not trying” was never my problem. I wasn’t behind the average because I was stupid or lazy—it was simply because I was not average.
In those days, society had yet to discover the obvious: Not everyone’s mind works the same way—and that’s okay.
Kids who learn differently are often called disabled, and shuttled off to a special school, or considered “slow” and placed in a remedial learning group. Worse yet, some are punished. I spent plenty of time standing in the corner. Humiliation did not cure me.
***
The concept of “learning disabilities” did not become mainstream until later, so I was never diagnosed, but I’ve always wondered if I had a few. I have long suspected I had ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) but have recently discovered I’m firmly on the autistic spectrum. You could have knocked me over with a feather.
My case is not as pronounced as it might’ve been, so I was not shipped off to an internment camp for fidgety slackers, but I experienced enough judgment to sympathize with anyone who is pigeonholed for not being like most people.
Capitalist societies need worker bees, and that’s what traditional education trains kids to be. But some folks are not suited for working in the hive, and that can make a person feel unfit, like an outsider who isn’t welcome to the party.
In my early adulthood, I lamented not being better at “normal” jobs (though these were jobs I didn’t want to do anyway!) but eventually, it was precisely my so-called “disorders” that enabled me to forge a successful career as a cartoonist.
Now in my sixties, I’ve written, drawn, and published over 12,000 cartoons in newspapers and magazines in the past few decades: one each day for almost forty years. And each time I’ve sat down to come up with a new gag, I’ve dropped into that place in my mind where I’d go as a kid during church each morning and tap into that creative flow—the same one that interrupted me when I’d try to read or listen to a lecture.
I have a theory why doodling allows me to pay better attention: Language and creativity operate from opposite sides of the brain. If I calm the creative side with drawing, it allows me to pay better attention to speech with the other side. When I look at those doodles later, I can remember what was being said when I created them.
For me, it is more effective than taking notes in English. (If only I could’ve drawn while reading!) But to this day, if I’m drawing, people assume I’m not paying attention.
That powerful, right-brain creative flow that refuses to be ignored and routinely inserts itself when I am trying to do something else is a symptom of my autism. But it is also the reason I’ve been able to adhere to such demanding cartoon publishing schedules.
What was labeled by the system as a “deficit” and a “disorder” turned out to be one of my greatest assets.
***
And my dyslexic sister who did poorly in school? She went on to manage a credit union, then later headed up her local Habitat for Humanity office, arranging financing and building homes for hundreds of low-income families in her community. Not so bad for a “stupid” and “lazy” kid.
As for my dad, he loves to tell the “if you don’t stop drawing all over your schoolwork” story on himself. He couldn’t be more proud of my career and laughingly thanks me for having ignored his fatherly advice.
He’s also lovingly apologized to my sister for misunderstanding her reading problems.
***
Most non-average behaviors are now called “neurodivergent,” which is a less judgmental and more accurate term than ADHD and the like—the Ds standing for “deficit” and “disorder.” “Neurodivergent” simply means a person thinks differently than is typical, and it’s no crime.
Know who else was different? Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Steven Hawking, Toni Morrison, and Bruce Springsteen all displayed characteristics that were not average but proved to be why we know their names. Though I certainly don’t deserve to, I’d stand in the corner with those folks any day.
If you are neurodivergent—or socially, culturally, or physically different than the local norm—remember that you’re in pretty good company. Embrace your differences and the struggles they present, whatever they are. Use them, revel in them, display them with pride.
Our entire universe thrives on diversity: No two things anywhere are exactly alike. And here on Earth among humans, diversity is what makes history.
Dan Piraro is the creator of the syndicated newspaper and online comic Bizarro
. His cartoons can be seen at bizarro.com
. His creative writing can be subscribed to via bizarro.com/signup.
To read his graphic novel Peyote Cowboy as it is being illustrated, see PeyoteCowboy.net
Quite early into the evening of November 5, America would learn the answer: A resounding, ghastly “No!”
The following day, lacking the words to express my own sadness and disappointment, I quoted the words of several Americans (and one Canadian) from their Letters to the Editor of the New York Times
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And here we are, two weeks after that disastrous night as the consequences of that “mandate”* are becoming frighteningly clear.
Trump’s odious, un-American intentions and plans are unmistakably reflected in his “transition” preparations, such as his proposed appointments of corrupt, incompetent, extremist loyalists — bent on retribution — to critical positions in his cabinet and executive office.
Millions of eloquent words have already been written by experts and pundits expressing disdain at the results of the election and fear of what the future holds.
The most powerful, sincere sentiments, however, are generally expressed by “regular” Americans in their neighbor-to-neighbor conversations, in their blogs and in letters to the editors of their local newspapers.
Here is one written by a good friend, Doris Rogers, and published by her local newspaper in beautiful Port Aransas:
Well, Americans, we can no longer say, “This is not who we are.” By a majority of voters, we have told the world that this is who we are – a nation that supports raping women, lying, foul abusive language, grifting, cheating workers, sexism, racism, demeaning others, criminal acts, etc. We are now supporting denial of women’s right to determine their lives, a theocracy of Christianity over democracy, denial of every citizen’s right to health care, denial of freedom to read and receive an education based on critical thinking, a belief in the superiority of white males over all others, and higher prices to pay on all imported goods.
What can we do to put our country back on track to be a democracy? At this point, I don’t really know. I do know I will continue to treat all people with respect, act honorably and look for opportunities to prevent the destruction of democracy. Benjamin Franklin was asked what had been created with the new nation. His reply was, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Let’s work together to make sure this republic continues to move forward to being a “shining beacon of light on the hill” that welcomes and respects all people.
While we are quoting, I just read a poem that seems to be hauntingly timely and pertinent.
It is Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Pity the Nation,” written in 2007 and inspired by Lebanese American Kahlil Gibran’s poem of the same title first published in 1933.
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!
And here are a few lines from Khalil Gibran’s 1933 poem:
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
::
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.
::
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again.
::
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
