Lucy Schaich
One of Bloomington’s most delightful citizens joins me on Big Talk this afternoon. Lucy Schaich has been a key member of the City of Bloomington Volunteer Network since the year 2000. Her grandmother and her mother instilled in her a responsibility to help neighbors in need. As a young girl, Lucy’s mom Georgia Schaich, who died this past November, toted hot meals to an elderly, homebound couple who lived down the block in her hometown of Maumee, Ohio, before she could sit down to eat her own dinner. Georgia went on to head a vital component of the Area 10 Council on Aging here for 15 years. Lucy must have inherited the good human gene because she’s been helping this city’s volunteers and nonprofit service organizations get together for most of her adult life.
BTW: Nominations are still being accepted by the CBVN for this year’s Be More Awards, Bloomington’s 37th annual recognition of the individuals and organizations that reach out and touch those in need in our community. Anyone can nominate a person for a Be More Award. Go online to recognize those you know who are getting up off their couches to bring good things to their neighbors and fellow citizens. Nominations will be accepted until February 3rd.
Tune in today at 5:30pm on WFHB, 91.3 for Big Talk or listen online. Even if you miss today’s airing of the show, you can still hear our chat via podcast. I’ll post that link here tomorrow.
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What’s Going On
Gotta admit it. I’m paying next to no attention to the farce being played out in Washington these days.
The newspapers say this is the third impeachment trial of a president in US history. By my lights, it’s the second pointless exercise of one the United States Constitution’s most vital provisions. The House accusing a president of high crimes and misdemeanors and the Senate trying him (always him, right?) is perhaps the chief protection we have against any one person hoping to become a dictator. Donald Trump took it upon himself as no president before him to turn this holy land into his own personal playground and, while it may be true that the Democratic House had a responsibility to rein him in, impeaching him under the current set of charges would always be a losing prop as long as the Republican Party remains in hypnotic thrall to the Grifter-in-Chief. He’ll be acquitted by the Senate and when he is, Trump will crow that he’s been exonerated by the gods. And he’ll move more rapidly and completely to turn this nation into the United States of Trump, or at the very least the United States of Uber-Rich Guys and Corporate Overlords. Nothing good’s going to come of this process.
I’m shooting the moon on the November election and more than ever I see old Joe Biden emerging as the Democratic candidate, a proposition that doesn’t exactly give me a frisson but, hell, I’ll be more than happy to cast a vote for a car wash manager over the incumbent 45th President of this weird land.
As far as the skit being played out in the Senate these days, I have no concern for what the prosecutors allege or for what Trump’s defenders claim. I’ve heard it all already. Strong-arming the Ukraine gov’t to drop the hammer on Biden and his son is perhaps the least of Trump’s sins, a type of muscle-flexing I’d guess dozens of presidents have attempted to one degree or another. The shame is the House couldn’t impeach Trump simply for being an evil son of a bitch.
What the House couldn’t do and the Senate won’t do, we have to do. If we fail in removing this tumor from the White House next fall, we’ll be inviting a metastasis that’ll make the world’s last remaining superpower a nightmarish dystopia that would beg for George Orwell or Aldous Huxley to describe.
In a lot of ways, I’m glad I’m in the last third or even quarter of my life. (Hell, I may be whistling past the graveyard even allowing for those short fractions of my existence remaining.) I don’t like where we’re going and I don’t see a hell of a lot of evidence we’re apt to change course any time soon.
If you’re more optimistic than I am, I envy you.
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Agreed. This “trial” is a waste of time, as there is no way the GOP will throw the sob out.