A photo from our recent trip to Ethiopia.
Women work as hard as the men, all without the conveniences of labor saving devices, and income from these hard labors is minuscule.
Last night was our 56th wedding anniversary. Here’s what we ordered at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Walnut Creek.
French onion soup, filet with shrimp, garlic mashed potatoes, and Creme Brulée, topping it off with a blueberry mojito. Two dinners, a glass of wine for Jadyne, a mojito for me, and tip, $300. While I was thoroughly enjoying my dinner the thought of the Ethiopian woman bearing wood flitted into my consciousness. I didn’t feel guilty, just uncomfortable.
Work at our house. Marco is a skilled craftsman. Nineteen years ago he built our deck. He has returned to stain it twice. His work is impeccable. We hired him to put a cement base beneath a flagstone path that was sitting on sand. He has a Monday-Friday job, so his only “free time” is on the weekend. He has subcontracted with three other workmen who have joined him in the project. Here’s a photo from our deck looking down at Marco as he cuts through the flagstone.
The four may finish today. If they do they will have worked immeasurably hard for the money we’ve agreed to pay Marco, and he, in turn, will pay them.
Another extreme. In 2008 Americans had the good fortune of electing Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States of America.
In his closing address in 2016 he said, “My fellow Americans, it has been the honor of my life to serve you. I won’t stop. In fact, I will be right there with you, as a citizen, for all my remaining days. But for now, whether you are young or whether you’re young at heart, I do have one final ask of you as your President— the same thing I asked when you took a chance on me eight years ago. I’m asking you to believe. Not in my ability to bring about change—but in yours.
I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: Yes, we can.”
And today, June 14, 2026, Donald Trump celebrates his 80th birthday with a UFC fight on the front lawn of the White House, what conservative writer Bill Kristol described with these words, “It’s vulgar, it’s violent, it’s commercial, it’s grandiose, it’s tacky, and it dishonors a place one thought worthy of care and respect. In other words, it’s Donald Trump.”
Extremes? We went from the President of the Harvard Law Review to an uneducated narcissistic psychopath. Never have two such extreme opposites occupied the same honored position in our history.
The NY Times published a graphic yesterday exposing the relative wealth of Elon Musk, and the rest of us. If dollar bills were stretched across LA, they hypothesized, the bottom 25% of Americans would be able to carpet a large living room carpet; the middle class, a quarter-acre house lot, and the top 10%, all the home lots on a street. and Musk? All of LA County. Put another way, if dollar bills were seconds, Musk’s money would last 32,000 years.
A trillion dollars could buy 100 major global airports, all the NFL franchises, or as a gift to Americans, $3000 for everyone.
We live in a world of extremes, and extremism isn’t limited to money. The poor people we met in Ethiopia seemed at least as happy as the wealthy ones in the US. If anything has changed, it is perhaps in the sense that the extremes are even more extreme, the poor are poorer and the rich are richer, the healthy are healthier, and the Trump administration has “lifted” people away from necessary health benefits. If “lifting” only meant something other than “depriving.”