Tag: United States

America Collection/General interest
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Looking Back at a Roller Coaster Year

by Fran Johns
Sunrise

Chainsaws, axes and masked militias must still contend with ordinary people standing up for justice 

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

(As a rule I avoid talking politics on this platform, although I mourn the days when we could talk political differences with civility. Or without offending. Some readers, though — thanks, both of you! — asked that I not withhold some essays that are posted on Medium &/or Substack. The following recaps a dark year.)

A little over a year ago I took a deep breath and started a Substack.

Writer friends had been suggesting such a move for years, but I had resisted. I already write on Medium and WordPress, I argued, and my learning curve bends about as slowly as the arc toward justice. One more technology? No, thank you.

But I needed help. My country had just elected a man who is the antithesis of everything I hold dear — an egotistic narcissist who lies with abandon, abuses women, denies science, craves power and cares not a fig about our fragile planet. He pledged to trade longtime allies for alignment with autocracies around the globe and to destroy institutions that had been built over decades and centuries to protect our freedoms.

I sank into a pit of despair. For a while I found myself saying, “OK, I’m done. I’m 91 years old, and I don’t want to live in this kind of a world. I’m done.” After a while, though, despair does not work very well as Lifestyle.

So I began The Optimistic Eye (Substack) with the express purpose of writing once a week about something politically encouraging or some positive action that was underway or could be taken. With that in mind, the daily task became that of sifting through the rivers of chaos and destruction that began even before Trump 2.0 took control to find reason for hope. 

It worked. The enterprise began with an interfaith Thanksgiving prayer breakfast that was all about light shining into the darkness. Once the Trump regime was in place we saw right away just how dark things would get — but there have always been people shining light. That long-ago breakfast featured prayers in just about every known religion and a few you hadn’t heard of: Native American, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu . . . and the Brahma Kumaris, who are all about inner light and peace.

The year would see a great deal more chaos and darkness than peace and light. But even as the doom squad swooped in, with Donald Trump and his then-best-friend Elon Musk leading the charge, forces for good could also be found mobilizing.

Over the year I wrote about Climate One and the fight to save Planet Earth despite the swift removal of environmental protections, about the healing power of music and the multitudes of individuals standing up for democracy one by one. Quickly, those single souls coalesced into like-minded groups and took to the streets. 

The No Kings marches were as satisfying to write about (well, almost) as to participate in. Below is the flip side of my all-purpose demonstration sign. Its front reads KAKISTOCRACY: Government by the worst. The least qualified. The most corrupt. More ordinary Americans turned out in 2025 to shine the light of truth than ever before in history. All. Year. Long.

For every destructive DOGE cut there was someone working against the destruction. As springtime eased into summer the Optimistic Eye spotted individuals and groups quickly picking up pieces. I even found people in Europe — where head-spinning executive orders were turning longtime allies into foes — who were still our friends. “We can’t understand what’s happened to your country,” one Sicilian homemaker said, “but we still think the Americans we know are good people.” 

Darkness spread. Our Republican-led Congress utterly abdicated its oversight responsibilities; even the Supreme Court caved. But the Optimistic Eye was always able to find a ray of light. Beginning with District Court Judge John Coughenour way back in January there were justices upholding the Constitution and keeping Mr. Trump from running totally amok. There were the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center and other nonprofits pitching in to help.

Then the cracks in Humpty Dumpty’s shell began to appear and the mad king was suddenly not all-powerful. In what has to be the most poetic justice ever known, serial abuser Jeffrey Epstein may play a major role in stopping Donald Trump’s tsunami-level abuse of humankind. Not even his MAGA warriors could stomach the stonewalling to protect himself against whatever incriminating messages lurk in the Epstein files. Atop that bit of good news — the truth of that long, sordid story will (largely) eventually be told — lo and behold the Supreme Court finally weighed in to limit the power of the mad king.

And ordinary citizens, the stars in the skies of democracy, continue to protest against ICE, to protect their immigrant neighbors, and take to the streets in defense of democracy. It ain’t over, Yogi Berra (and Lenny Kravitz) would have us know, ’til it’s over. 

This essayy also is The Optomistic Eye post #77. In the first essay of The Optimistic Eye (12/13/25) was this quotation from the SFIC interfaith proyer breakfast, “Candles of liberty flicker and dim; there will always be those to light them again.”

Happy 2026 to us all. Bring it on.

General interest
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Music for Healing and a Helping Hand

by Fran Johns

“THIS IS WHAT WE DO. THIS IS WHO WE ARE”

Conductor Outwater & Pianist Ohlsson taking a bow (Author photo)

“When we are living in cruel times,” the maestro said, “music heals.”

Symphony conductor Edwin Outwater was speaking to an audience of several thousand* who, appalled by the cruelties being inflicted by our government on innocent people everywhere, had come for a few hours of healing, and the hopefulness that helping others can bring. (*Davies Symphony Hall seats 2,700+ not including the performers. I spotted very few empty seats.)

In the few short months since raging wildfires brought suffering and devastation to their Southern California neighbors several ambitious musicians pulled together an astounding feat: An hours-long benefit concert involving the San Francisco Symphony, Musicians of the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the full San Francisco Symphony Chorus. With noted piano soloist Garrick Ohlsson thrown in for good measure and a surprise encore, after the applause died down, of a piece from the Leonard Bernstein operetta Candide.

Net proceeds from the event will be split evenly between two organizations providing relief to Los Angeles fire victims, the Entertainment Community Fund and Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles: ReBUILD LA.

The concert was a healing time, and more:

Orchestra and chorus gave the first SFSymphony performance of Aaron Copeland’s ‘The Promise of Living’ from The Tender Land; Ohlsson and the Symphony got standing ovations for their performances of a Rachmaninoff concerto and, after intermission, Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony №9. But it was Outwater’s remarks at the evening’s end that summed up the event and its meaning.

Music, he told the now-calmed (but still enthusiastic) audience, can offer both a balm and a bridge, bringing people together in times of need. (The Optimistic Eye was particularly happy with Outwater’s noting that Candide, after all, winds up with a salute to optimism.) We don’t stop to ask questions about political or social details, Outwater added; we simply pitch in to help.

“This is what we do,” he said. “This is who we are.”

# # #

(This essay appeared first on my new(ish) Substack page The Optimistic Eye, where I publish at the end of each week one positive message or potential action in defense of democracy. You’re welcome to visit or subscribe; it’s free.)

America Collection/General interest
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What You Don’t Know . . . Might Hurt Others

by Fran Johns

WORD OF THE DAY: ANASAGNOSIA

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

“He doesn’t know he’s sick,” a friend said this morning; “he simply can’t separate fantasy from reality. It’s called anasagnosia.”

The friend was referring to a politician who will remain nameless, but I think it may be a national malady. By definition anasagnosia is “a neurological condition in which the patient is unaware of his or her neurological deficit or psychiatric condition.”

Or maybe, reality. For exampIe, I have a habit of getting national news from the print edition of the New York Times, from PBS and NPR and a few left-leaning TV channels. But at least twice a week I watch another major TV channel favored by those of a more conservative mindset. It presents a narrative that makes perfect sense, and most days bears absolutely no relation to anything I’ve gleaned from the sources above.

(If you get your national news from social media, well, bless your heart. There’s no hope for you.)

To be clear, there is nothing humorous or satiric about anasagnosia. In the realm of mental illness it applies to many of the worst diagnoses.

But half the country, I think, may be suffering from it. (Pick whichever half you like.) A changed, hopeful future can emerge from a dangerous present. And scary past. But which past, and which future? Are half of us blind to our blindness? 

If there is relief, before mid-November, I’m not sure what it might be. But for the mentally healthy there is, at least, a treatment: Work to support your reality. Write letters, send postcards. Speak softly but carry a copy of the Constitution. Vote.

And be kind to the other half.

America Collection/General interest
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Solving the Abortion Rights Problem

by Fran Johns

A SIMPLE, EFFECTIVE PLAN ACCEPTABLE TO PRO-CHOICE AND ANTI-ABORTION SIDES ALIKE

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

I don’t know why nobody’s thought of this before.

Recent news of the Florida Solution (isn’t Florida coming up with great policies right and left?) to its peacock problem suggests the perfect answer to the testy abortion debates. Universal Vasectomy!

(We will set aside the peahen here. Peahens have never had access to reproductive choice so what do they know? We could ask growing numbers of women in choice-less states. But it’s mostly the peacocky guys making laws anyway, and they pay little or no attention to the reality of us peahenny women.)

Clearly, if Universal Vasectomy were put into place the whole abortion problem would go away, and women could set about accessing the reproductive care that they — and presumably peahens — deserve. 

This policy, as described in a New York Times article, “would allow peacocks to continue acting like dominant males, displaying their dazzling feathers and assembling their harems, though they could no longer fertilize eggs.” Does this make sense, or what?

The same issue of The Times carried another article which sums up the need for UV: An 89 year old man voting against Ohio’s sneaky attempt to restrict abortion was quoted thusly: “If men was having babies there wouldn’t be none of this nonsense.”

OK, how is this going to work, you ask. Easy peasey.

All we have to do is set up a national trap-and-release program for all males of the species. Each will then be given the choice — imagine! individual choice! — of either assuming full responsibility, in perpetuity, for any fertilized egg that may result from any future sexual adventure for the rest of his natural life — or, Snip! 

There will admittedly be costs involved, for things like reimbursement to physicians administering the simple procedure (I suggest that thousands of women MDs who have endured harassment or worse will eagerly sign up for the program.) Solution: take it out of the defense budget. Who’s going to notice a few billion there? Especially after the need for dazzling- feathers displays concurrenty diminishes, a peripheral benefit. 

Once this innovative program goes into effect in the U.S., countries around the globe will recognize it as widely satisfying and at the least cost-effective, and quickly follow.

Voila! World peace.

I rest my case.

America Collection/General interest
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The Price of Politics Today

by Fran Johns

WHEN DID WE LET CRUELTY GO MAINSTREAM ?

KQED’s Marisa Lagos with Representative Adam Schiff, July 21 (Author photo)

“I can’t stand that millions of people hate you,” Eve Schiff said to her husband Adam not long ago. (Yep, Adam & Eve are married.) “You just have to accept it,” Schiff observed.

Why? When did hate become something to “accept and move on (from”) in the once kinder, gentler U.S.?

Not to mention cruelty. When the moderator kept to that topic Schiff told of another episode, something that bothers him a little more: a package came to his DC office containing two bullets; each had the name of one of Schiff’s young children written on it.Is that one more thing we simply accept?

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Schiff said; “other than to get a new job. The first time I mentioned getting death threats to (former Speaker) Nancy Pelosi she said, ‘Welcome to the club.’” Pelosi knows a little more about this stuff than most of us would like, having had her 83-year-old husband bashed in the head in the middle of the night by a crazed guy who didn’t like her politics. He wanted, actually, to wait for Rep. Pelosi to come home (though she was in DC and crazy guy David DePape was at her San Francisco home) so he could break her kneecaps.

Surely it’s time for us kinder/gentler citizens to stand up for a return to civility. Even at the risk of getting knee-capped.

Decades ago, when my children were growing up (in the pre-internet age,) I was working as a freelance newspaper and magazine writer. I often covered city and county commission meetings or hearings on highly controversial issues. New highways, housing developments, policies that would directly affect communities and citizens alike. I remember more than a few events that came close to fistfights, and one that did get violent before police removed an inebriated objector. This was before anyone had to worry about guns.

I remember people calling other people names, swearing lifelong enmity, vowing to get an opponent removed from office or defeated at the polls.

But cruelty? Death threats? Anonymous messages suggesting terrible things might happen to families and children? Enough already.

Surely it’s time for the majority of us — and I know we are in the majority — to stand up for civility. Confrontation is out, since we have become a culture of guns and one friendly word can get your head blown off.

But we can write letters to editors. We can let those who support cruelty know that it won’t be tolerated. Calls and emails from outside a politician’s district might get tossed aside, but enough of them at least get his or her attention. Calls and emails to your own representatives might not get personal responses, but they get tallied. 

We can support the nonprofits working to protect and build the vote. VoteForward. GOTV (Get Out the Vote) campaigns. We can work hard to replace evildoers with civil-doers. 

We can vote.

America Collection/General interest
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Can We Talk About Guns?

by Fran Johns

Can we talk about DOING SOMETHING about guns?

Photo by Paul Einerhand on Unsplash

I am, to be clear, just a little old lady who never messed with weapons of any sort beyond a couple of curiosity-type visits to rifle ranges and a youthful flirtation with archery. But still.

At last count (according to a recent ABC News report,) 9,870 Americans have died from gun violence this year. It’s probably more by now, since people are shooting themselves or each other at an alarming rate. The rate at which one person is shooting a bunch of people is somewhat more alarming. The Nashville school tragedy was the latest of the 130 mass shootings this year counted by the Gun Violence Archive. Since then: Kentucky.

Isn’t it all worth talking about?

I don’t mean talk as in making a speech or broadcasting your great thoughts into the wind; I mean talk as in having a conversation. An old-fashioned civil dialog: you tell me stuff while I listen, I’ll respond with more stuff while — hopefully — you listen.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

A lot of people just talk about “Second Amendment rights.” Well, okay. Those guys who wrote the second amendment a few centuries ago were, of course, talking about “well regulated militias;” apparently James Madison wanted to be sure state militias could defend themselves against the feds.

Fast forward to 2008, and more guys (on the Supreme Court, in DC v Heller; Ginsberg was among the dissenters so it was all guys) expanded that to mean everybody has a right to handguns for self-defense. Seems a stretch, but here we are.

Could we talk about my right to enjoy a latte without being freaked out by that guy with a gun on his hip v his right to swagger round bearing arms?

Photo by Jess Eddy on Unsplash

Shouldn’t it be okay for little old ladies to talk about how freaked out they are by guys packing heat? Thank heaven I don’t live in Florida, where now, apparently, just about anybody any time can pick up a gun and carry it anywhere he or she (women & girls packing heat at Starbucks also freak me out) feels inclined. I would write a book on this but it would get banned, so why bother. Then there’s the congressman – I wiped his name from my conscious memory – who suggested parking tanks at schools.

I do not believe we are helpless. Or that tanks will make our kids feel safe. I do not believe, as TN Rep. Tim Burchett does, that there’s nothing we can do about guns because “criminals are going to be criminals” and Congress is “not gonna fix it” (though so far he’s right on that) or that we need “a real revival in this country” rather than gun control of any sort.

I know revivals. I’ve been to a bunch of them. I promise you no revival is going to reduce gun violence, or even the sheer number of guns that freak out little old ladies.

I do not believe, as does TN Rep. Andy Ogles — he who posed for a Christmas photo with his happily armed family — that it is “ridiculous” to blame guns for those dead children and adults in our latest school shooting. (Unless there’s been another school shooting since Covenant School.)

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

Why can’t we talk about mass shootings? And doing something to reduce them? For instance:

You can’t have mass shootings without guns to shoot masses. Most of those shooters are not criminals — or at least, they weren’t criminals until they picked up a gun and started killing people. Most of those guns are assault weapons designed to kill a whole lot of people. I know people who hunt, many of whom are very dear to me; I don’t know anyone outside of the military who has an assault weapon. Or who thinks we should all have access to one if we take a mind to.

Could we just talk about assault weapons? Then maybe we could talk about why anybody needs one and why they shouldn’t be banned. When assault weapons were banned, fewer people got killed. Maybe that’s worth talking about.

If we can talk, we can find common ground. I don’t think any of us really love the fact that tiny children are learning mass shooter drills before their ABCs. We could start there.

I may be just an unarmed little old lady, but I am not stupid. I do know that talking — just having civil conversations without shouting and getting angry — is not popularly done any more.

But we CAN. Maybe we need to try harder.

Photo by Aleksandr Ledogorov on Unsplash

America Collection/General interest
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Did the Founding Fathers Miss Something?

by Fran Johns

MAYBE WE COULD LEARN FROM THE MICROSTATES . . .

Rep. of San Marino Postcard (Author photo)

The above postcard recently arrived from my world-traveler grandson with the opening line: “Continuing the tradition of sending you postcards from only the world’s finest microstates . . .” Microstates? Who knew?

Certainly not this grandmother. So I went straight to the internet.

What I learned led me to re-think the socio-political systems of my beloved U.S.A. Which systems, when you think about it, have invited a lot of re-thinking recently anyway.

In case you (also) didn’t know, San Marino is the world’s fifth-smallest country. Vatican City and Monaco are #1 and #2; at 23+ square miles, San Marino beats out 62-sq-mile Liechtenstein. It is officially the Most Serene Republic of San Marino — and for openers, what if we became the Most Serene United States?

As do we, San Marino has a constitution with which it has governed itself for centuries. But here’s the deal: their constitution specifies that San Marino’s democratically elected (goodbye, electoral college!) legislature must choose two heads of state every six months. These are known as captains regent. Clearly every red-blooded American would aspire to be Captain Regent so the issue of unqualified candidates would take care of itself once and for all.

Actually, the voters elect the legislature, from which the captains regent emerge. The Great and Central Council (doesn’t that beat ‘House’ and ‘Senate’?) is a unicameral legislature with 60 members. Elections are held once every five years — imagine 3 or 4 years of peace without campaigns.

There is proportional representation in all nine administrative dstricts. In other words, no district with teeny tiny population gets to tip the governmental scales. If you’re 18 in San Marino you get to vote, and your vote is precisely equal to that of every fellow citizen.

Here, though, is the icing on this political cake: The Great and Central Council chooses those two captains regent. They get to serve as heads of state for exactly six months. How much trouble can you cause in six months? Meanwhile, they share power equally, so they have to get along. Think Shumer and McCarthy — or maybe don’t.

Admittedly, this might work more easily in a country of 33 thousand than one of almost 33 million. Still, it has promise. I’m considering sending a suggestion to my own representative, who’s taken on impossible tasks before. Her name is Pelosi.

America Collection/General interest
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A Drought-Relief Road Trip

by Fran Johns
Serious rain clouds ahead

After more than six months of near-total drought in Northern California, one cross-country flight to JFK and a side trip to Ithaca provided a reminder of wet stuff from the skies. It’s been easy to forget: by last May, 2022 was the driest year ever recorded in California. We’ve tried everything but the rain dance; and probably there are rain dances going on somewhere. Can we spell Climate Change? California looks as if someone might drop a match and the whole state will go up in flames.

Setting out from Ithaca to Manhattan one August morning, though, things looked promising. Cloudy skies! And we’re not talking fog here! (No offense, Karl the fog.)

Intermittently the skies brightened – enough for glimpses of leaves just starting to turn. Another east coast specialty. (The orange markers were filling in for full fall colors to come.)

Some of parched California’s favorite things? Raindrops on windshields! Especially, as in this case, when someone else is driving. It was possible to watch the raindrops ahead, and to look toward the west where the cloudy skies could be seen breaking up.

And then— rounding another mountain or two, blue skies again. For someone totally, thoroughly heart-transplanted to San Francisco, sunny skies to glorious rains in a six-hour drive across New York is still a gift worth sharing.

Author photos from the passenger seat; driving courtesy of granddaughter Connery O’Brien

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