CALLAHANTICS

It is official. Thank you for your time with us Trumplandia. You are free to go become your own nation and make Trump your Plutarch. I (like many Americans) have finally reached the grief stage of acceptance. Those of you on the fence deciding whether you are Trumplandians or Americans, you are officially offered the freedom to choose this one last time. So go for it. Secede and go form a country. Create your own union of states. Heck, just for the hell of it, you could even name yourselves the Confederate States again and head off to live your lives; (provided your Plutarch does not insist his name be used). Those of us who chose to stay in America wish you well and hope you go on to live happy and healthy lives. Please join together and adapt the F.U.S. Constitution to serve your needs and wants and have at it. I think Americans are finally willing to set all of you free. We can send some diplomats over if you want to negotiate with the different demographics and decide who gets to s...

While many of us are becoming increasingly desensitized to the daily chaos we are currently experiencing, perhaps we need to discuss some issues more than others now as a nation. Specifically, we need to begin to deal with the financial and employment impact that Covid-19 is causing. Why? Because whether we see it or not, each of us is experiencing almost constant trauma. Every moment for the past 150 days, Americans are constantly coping with family, friends, colleagues and neighbors who are dying, or becoming permanently disabled due to Covid-19. We are also making daily decisions to weigh acceptable risks to both our own wellbeing and the health of those we love. Like it or not, none of us can truly escape the impact Covid-19 is having on each of us both personally and tangentially. While that is more than enough to keep us all quite busy, that is not all. We also recently experienced many external events that are continuing to impact us. From the passing of Congressman John Lewis, ...

Teachers are vital. No matter what age, no matter what subject and whether they are public, private, magnet, charter, kindergarten, grade, middle, high, special needs, advanced, college prep, and multiple other categories we can put them in; they are vital. Just go ask the parents who simultaneously are in the role of parent, teacher, counselor, IT tech, spouse, and employee/job seeker. So it has been remarkably strange listening to the different perspectives on reopening schools, virtually, in person, forcing teachers back to work; throwing out the hundreds of thousands of international students (who pay full freight to universities across the country BTW). Teachers who are generally overworked, undercompensated, underappreciated and undervalued are now being told to go back to work or else    the ones who are higher risk ( nearly a third ) are being basically coerced into going back to teach in person in a few weeks. Threatening their keeping their jobs in a market where sch...

On March 11, 2020, the world looked remarkably normal for one experiencing a pandemic. in DC when a variety of event and Governor Cuomo had begun the process of discussing the “cluster of Corona Virus (soon changed to Covid-19) cases” in NYC, Biden winning Missouri and NCAA Basketball redefining March Madness for the rest of 2020. My federal office closed down and furloughed me with nearly 40 contractor/colleagues the night before, beginning the self-quarantine process and Red Cross (who I had been on-call with for nearly 2 weeks asked me to go to the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in DC. So, while my husband continued working virtually for his organization and managing his project team, off to the EOC I went.  Blood Donor Ambassador:  The person at a blood drive or donation center who checks in people and helps them fill out the form to donate)   Casework Volunteer:  The person who provides one-on-one direct support to clients. Some support disaster response...

OK, I have, like most Americans been sitting in silence watching the bona fide reality show wannabe that has been a constant for 1080 days now. I have experienced multiple episodes of conscious confusion between simple overload and downright rage over the actions that our country’s leadership have chosen to take. It is critical that we as a nation try to more clearly understand the circumstances that we are currently experiencing and not simply hide behind our computers, or televisions, our substances or our social media to stay in the denial stage beyond what our lives are about to become. The decisions made by our leaders in the past 1080 days have included withdrawing from a nuclear deal isolating us from our allies and forcing them to reconsider their relationships with the United States and all others. They have also decided to enact trade restrictions on goods from China, Mexico and others that have directly affected multiple states and devalued a variety of American exports...