Commentary
FL’s COVID craziness keeps getting deeper — how dare the government try to save lives?
“Human kind,” said the poet, “cannot bear too much reality.” Many Republicans seem especially resistant, preferring to dwell in a miasma of Deep State conspiracies and Internet nonsense inspiring them to believe that Hillary Clinton drinks babies’ blood, Trump won the 2020 election, and that ingesting over-the-feed-store-counter tablets for deworming horses is a better way […]
Pulte Homes destroys 22 FL tortoise burrows, pays a paltry penalty
Say what you will about Florida (and many of you have), but we’ve sure got some unusual crimes here. A surprising number of them involve reptiles. You have probably heard about the guy who, in 2016, tossed an alligator through a Wendy’s drive-thru window in Royal Palm Beach. Last year, Sanford police recovered a five-foot […]
My 9/11 prayer: The lessons we can learn from the great silence
Two decades ago, my sister was teaching English at the Hosaka English Academy, in Numazu, Japan, about two hours southwest of Tokyo. Sometime in the dark hours after the attack, as the entire world was struggling to make sense of a tragedy that was nearly incomprehensible in its scale, the mother of one of my sister’s students came […]
What was it all for? Looking back on military service in Afghanistan
I can still taste the sand, feel the heat on my skin. We were told to smell our water before we drank it, just in case something had been added to it. I remember the faces, including my own, when one of our brothers or sisters in arms lost their lives. I remember the look […]
Rescuers race to save Florida’s corals while federal government plans more dredging
About four months ago, I drove over to Orlando and saw something I’d never seen before, something guaranteed to produce a reaction of “Ooooo! Ahhhh!” It was sort of like seeing the fireworks at Disney World for the first time, only not nearly as loud. While Disney may be the quintessential Mickey Mouse operation, that […]
A deluge of desperate ‘Team Trump’ emails: ‘There is no end to them’
Former President Donald J. Trump must be getting desperate. Over the past few weeks he has deluged me with emails begging for money and trying to sell me various sorts of stuff that I would mostly describe as “junk.’’ He is clearly deranged. “Lucy, President Trump knows you have been here for him since day […]
Abortion foes play a dangerous game in encouraging vigilantes to snoop on neighbors
Americans like to say we don’t leave Americans behind. We don’t abandon people to be oppressed and victimized by a bunch of gun-toting yahoo zealots who hate freedom and hate science and think they have a direct line to God. So, when do we start evacuating women and girls from Texas? Women and girls in […]
This Labor Day, let’s renew our commitment to students, educators and public schools
Our country was founded on the premise that in order to protect our democracy, we need an educated electorate. It was our Founding Fathers who established the basis of public schools — an American idea. Today, millions of educators nationwide continue this mission, even in the middle of a pandemic, ensuring that every child in […]
Bookman: Threats against nurses, school boards rage on as mainstream GOP stands by
In a press conference at the state Capitol this week, Georgia’s public health commissioner condemned a campaign of bullying, intimidation and threats directed at health care workers attempting to improve the state’s abysmal vaccination record against COVID- 19. “Many of our line workers are receiving threats, are receiving hostile emails, harassing emails,” Dr. Kathleen Toomey […]
Phosphate pollution reports give Florida residents déjà vu
One summer when I was in college, I worked at a Pensacola textbook warehouse. One of my co-workers was a funny guy named Jim. While we packed boxes of textbooks to ship all over the country, Jim would be cracking us up with one-liners, jokes and stories. Jim was a huge fan of Monty Python’s […]
Dreaming of Afghanistan past while fearing for Afghanistan present
Five times I landed at the Kabul airport. Before touching down, I saw women doing what I was doing — pulling a headscarf out of a bag. I experienced natural trepidation: Would I get through the immigration and identity card processes, pay a baggage helper appropriately to get me where I needed to go, find […]
What do we owe to each other?
The politicization of coronavirus vaccines and mask-wearing has been a depressing reminder of the downside of American individualism. The successful functioning of a free republic depends on people taking personal responsibility for their actions. Too often now that translates into a disregard for the rights of others, coupled with an insistence that our own opinions, […]