Jennifer Meeropol is the granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and the daughter of RFC Founder, Robert Meeropol. Jenn became the Executive Director of the RFC on September 1, 2013. Prior posts on this page were written by Robert (unless otherwise noted), and represent his opinions, which are not necessarily shared by the RFC.This week’s deluge of coverage concerning the constitutionality of the 2010 health care law has overshadowed a case heard last week that is, perhaps, even more important to the long-term vigor of our democracy. On March 21st the Court heard oral argument on Steven Howards’ suit against the Secret Service agents who arrested him after he told Vice President Cheney in 2006 that he thought our country’s actions in Iraq were “disgusting.”
My book, An Execution in the Family, was released in Germany in 2008. The publisher brought me for a promotional tour in March of that year. I did a reading in Weimar, in the center of the country, and while I was there I toured the Buchenwald concentration camp, exactly three years ago today. I wrote the following shortly after returning home...
Noam Chomsky recently wrote that “two dark clouds … hover over all consideration of [the] global order: nuclear war and environmental catastrophe, both literally threaten… the decent survival of the species.” (http://lists.portside.org/cgi-bin/listserv/wa?A2=PORTSIDE;b6d2f8ef.1202c).
Spring has come a month early to interior Southern New England, and that’s after the winter that wasn’t. In the Northeast several consecutive winters that included periods of intense cold and snow had lulled us into thinking that we were experiencing “old-fashioned weather” despite global warming. Many did not realize that the weather pattern of those winters concealed ongoing climatic warming. This year’s weather pattern maximized the impact of climate change and the vast majority of North America experienced the result. (I’m not surprised by this turn of events.
Sometimes catch phrases become so commonplace that we lose sight of their meaning. Lincoln’s 203rd birthday a couple of days ago left me thinking about one of them. He concluded his Gettysburg address with the oft-repeated words that those who died fighting for the Union during that great battle fought so “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”