Columnists

On February 7, 1968, US forces demolished Ben Tre, a provincial capitol in South Vietnam. An Army Major declared, 'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” On August 2, 2011, President Obama signed the draconian law to raise the US debt limit and unravel our social safety net. He should have quipped, “It became necessary to destroy the economy to save it.” -more-

It’s the worst kind of déjà vu. Last month a juvenile Cooper’s hawk was found dead in a pool of blood on a west Berkeley sidewalk, not far from where three other hawks succumbed four years ago. This year’s victim tested positive for the anticoagulant rodenticide brodifacoum, with a trace amount of another rodenticide, diphacinone. Brodifacoum was also implicated in at least two of the 2007 deaths. -more-

While vacationing in Charleston, South Carolina earlier this year, the local media were full of editorials complaining about the April 20, 2011, complaint issued by the National Labor Relations Board against Boeing Company alleging that Boeing’s decision to assemble large commercial aircraft at a new final assembly plant in South Carolina violated the National Labor Relations Act. The complaint alleges that Boeing illegally “transferred” work from its unionized assembly plant in Seattle, Washington to this new South Carolina facility. -more-

“The liberal sees outer, removable institutions as the ultimate source of evil; sees man’s social task as creating a world in which evil will disappear. His tools for this task are progress and enlightenment. The conservative sees the inner unremovable nature of man as the ultimate source of evil; sees man’s social task as coming to terms with a world in which evil is perpetual and in which justice and compassion will be perpetually necessary. His tools for this task are the maintenance of ethical restraints inside the individual and maintenance of unbroken, continuous social patterns inside the given culture as a whole.” -more-

Bouquets of daffodils and odoriferous sweet peas appeared on the white metal stand next to my hospital bed, delivered to the Stamford Hospital children’s ward by person or persons unknown. They were from the garden of the Paradise sisters. -more-

If you are a person with mental illness who “presents well,” meaning that from looking at you and speaking to you, one couldn’t tell that there is anything “wrong” with you, people may expect too much of you. If you have a mental illness and your spouse doesn’t, it can create a headache for you when the spouse doesn’t have understanding of your disability. The same goes for parents, who might be laying guilt trips on you because you can’t seem to “make a go of it” in the work world. You could even be your own worst tormentor. You might be constantly comparing yourself to some unfair standard impossible to live up to. -more-