As I write this, my Jewish friends are observing Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah—Yom HaShoah, Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. A recent survey revealed that 63 percent of Americans don’t know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Nearly 20 percent of millennials and Gen Z in New York—New York!—feel that Jews caused the […]
John Ashbaugh
Posted inOpinion
It’s too easy to forget that we’re all swimming in the same stream
I’ve been paddling in the turbulent waters of “extremist” ideology lately, from both sides of the political continuum. If our nation’s democratic spectrum can be described as a bell curve, these would be the “long tails” of that curve. Those are the places inhabited by the fanatics, the conspiracy theorists, the QAnon cultists on the […]
Posted inOpinion
The predicted Republican tidal wave of change in both houses of Congress fizzled out
On Nov. 8, voters delivered their verdict on the first two years of the Biden administration. Conventional wisdom pundits had predicted a “red tsunami”: The GOP only needed to flip a net of five seats to seize the majority in the House, and one seat in the Senate. Most observers had projected that they would […]
Posted inOpinion
Reflecting on wars and diplomacy, past and present
Sixty years ago, the world stood inches from nuclear armageddon as President John F. Kennedy went mano a mano with Nikita Khrushchev to force the USSR to remove nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba. Sun readers are mostly much younger than me, but you probably know how the crisis was resolved if you’ve read anything about […]
Posted inOpinion
Was the Jan. 6 insurrection the ‘high-water mark’ of the right-wing rebellion or the opposite?
I’ve been a student of our American Civil War since I was 10 years old. I first delved into that conflict in Mr. Greer’s fifth grade class in 1965, when the nation observed the centennial of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, effectively ending the war. That summer, our family visited Gettysburg National Battlefield in Pennsylvania. I […]