I use a lot of dangerous drugs. Well, not me personally, but on my patients. Of course, I use dangerous drugs only when the disease I’m treating is more dangerous than the drug. In diseases that are not life-threatening, naturally I avoid dangerous drugs and try to stick with safer therapies. Chemotherapy drugs can save your life, but they can also have significant side effects. Side effects that you would not tolerate if you were treating a sinus infection. But if you have cancer, and you’re trying to avoid dying, it may make sense to take a chance on side effects – even very serious side effects. In truly desperate circumstances, there are few actions one would not consider, no matter how drastic.

That’s what always bothered me about the great leftist / progressive / socialist leaders of the 20^th century: Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, and so on. They saw a problem and took drastic measures to fix it. When I consider the horrifyingly drastic measures they took, I wonder, “What possible problem did they see that warranted such drastic actions? Who on earth could have possibly thought that was a good idea?” Even for those who lack sympathy for others, killing millions of people is no small thing. They claimed that they were trying to save or improve their countries for their citizens. Which some considered to be an adequate reason. Think about that. And then, think about Greta Thunberg.

The scene is K Street, NW Washington DC around 11 a.m. Friday by McPherson Square. This massive protest by Extinction Rebellion was staged to bring the World Bank to its knees and stop the financing of the ongoing capitalist plot to kill the earth.

I don’t just mean an ordinary, obsessive-compulsive kind of thing. I mean detached from reality completely. He is scary.

It is high time people throw off old preconceptions of Republicans as the mean descendants of cotton plantation owners, you know, the old diatribe about white male privilege. With Trump’s rising numbers among minorities, maybe we’re all finally seeing people as just people who are all just trying to persevere and build a better life for themselves and their families.

I look at my children. They are half Hungarian blood on my wife’s side; that side came to the US through Ellis Island in the early 20^th century and somehow they all found each other. They were not privileged at all; they had nothing. They were the children of simple farmers whose land was confiscated by the communists. They did not come but were sent to America for a better future, which they found in the factories in and around Bridgeport, CT.