Looking for America: Beauty and the Bomb Cyclone (a series)

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I lugged what seemed like the 800th load of wood to feed the fireplace’s insatiable appetite, shoveled paths to the car, the compost, and the wood pile, endured two frozen pipes, two nights without heat, and two days when the thermometer never got above single digits . . . and that was just a warm-up (if that’s the word I’m looking for) to the “Bomb Cyclone,” which was heading up the coast of Maine with sub-zero temperatures trailing in its wake.

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Looking for America, Coping with Depression (a series)

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Like more than 16 million Americans, I suffer from depression. For many years I took medication to help cope with my mood swings. I also talked off and on for over two decades with a wonderfully helpful man whom I adamantly refused to call my therapist. But he retired, which is what happens when you (and your support group) grow older, which is, needless to say, depressing.

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Looking for America, from Tombstone to the Lincoln Memorial (a series)

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Most Americans know about the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, when 250,000 people marched for “Jobs and Freedom.” The march ended at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the speech that would define his legacy, with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson standing behind him saying, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin, tell ‘em about the dream!” – and he did.

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Senator Murkowski’s Sad Bargain

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The price of Senator Lisa Murkowski’s vote to approve the tax bill and reverse herself on health care was to end 57 years – dating back to the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower – of protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Like her father who preceded her as Alaska’s senator, she has been fighting for years to open up ANWR to oil and gas drilling. It looks like she will finally get her wish.

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The real cost of hush money

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$32 million is a troubling amount of money. That’s how much Lis Wiehl was paid to keep silent about her allegations of sexual harassment by Bill O’Reilly, including a “nonconsensual sexual relationship,” which seems a euphemism for rape. That brings to $45 million the amount paid to O’Reilly’s victims – and almost $100 million paid on behalf of male employees of Fox News. All the agreements had confidentiality clauses.

The amounts are jaw dropping – and you could argue that the payments to Harvey Weinstein’s victims, in the form of film careers, were worth far more. More troubling is what they bought: silence.

The women are victims. The game the men were playing was not about sex, it was about power. Their behavior was reprehensible; it was also just creepy. “When you’re a star,” Donald Trump said, “you can do anything.”

The deck was stacked: Juliet Huddy told Megyn Kelly she’s still “terrified” of Fox News, even after her lawyers hammered out a six-figure settlement. “You know that you’re just this one person that’s about to go up against literally a machine.”

And that’s what’s so troubling about the silence. It wasn’t just one person. There were dozens of them at Fox, thousands elsewhere – yesterday the California Senate hired a law firm to investigate sexual intimidation claims in Sacramento.

The real cost of silence is not the huge sums the perps and their companies paid in hush money. It’s that it allowed other and future victims, in the midst of a criminal epidemic, to believe they were alone.

♪ O Say Can We See Through the Demagoguery ♪

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Chris Long will be working for nothing this year. The 6’3” 270-pound defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles said this week that he’s donating his next 10 weeks’ salary to increasing educational opportunities for underserved kids in the three cities where he has played professional football. Earlier he had given his first six weeks’ pay for scholarships in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. That’s 16 weeks, the entire NFL season, for which he is paid $1 million.

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