Quote of the Week...from George McGovern

The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.                            ---George McGovern

In this era when civility has so disintegrated that crowds of people rise up at a Trump rally to chant "Send her back!" regarding one of his political opponents whom he has just spoken against, the late Senator McGovern's above quote is worth taking into account.  Now I understand that those who defend our country in the military...sometimes laying their lives down in times and places of international conflict...do have to strictly follow orders and believe in their missions as it all goes down the chain of command.  But that's not what McGovern, himself a decorated fighter pilot in World War II (35 missions, Distinguished Flying Cross), was talking about.  For it's those brave soldiers who do what they do not only to defend the "homeland", but also our precious freedoms we hold so dear here.  And of them all, perhaps the most valuable is our freedom to express our opinions openly without the fear of persecution.  That does not imply, of course, that what we say or write won't have consequences...but the state should not be in the business of shaming and intimidating people it disagrees with, and the president is the personification of the state in our country.  The great late conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia once remarked that he never put down other people...just their ideas.  And that's what's so disturbingly wrong with the atmosphere pervading our political world today.  A lot of Trump fans accuse his opponents of hating on him but they need to acknowledge that he set the pattern with his continual insults against anyone he regarded as a critic or adversary.  I do not like the attitude of the four freshman representatives dubbed "The Squad" because they also tend to personify their criticisms of others instead of focusing on their ideas and philosophies.  One of these stated recently that if your skin color is like hers and you don't support her agenda, then you need to shut up.  Another claimed in essence that criticizing any of them amounted to racism.  And I am getting so tired of politicians and supposedly unbiased media figures hanging the terms "racist" or "bigot" so freely on people who are expressing a different opinion on one of the many important issues facing us.  It's getting so bad now that politicians who are not saying anything are being so accused by their silence.  I did not like Donald Trump's recent tweets suggesting the four maverick representatives go back to  their old countries and believe they displayed his ignorance to the world: one of them is the descendant of American slaves, one has Puerto Rican ancestry...which means she and her family as American citizens go back further than Trump's family, one...of Palestinian parentage...was born in the USA, and the other is a naturalized citizen from Somalia.  ALL are American citizens and were duly elected by their constituents to represent them.  I don't agree with a lot of what they have to say, but let's concentrate on their ideas and not them as people, please.  And it would help for them to do likewise...