The opinions expressed here are those of the author and should not be taken as medical advice. If you are having a crisis, you must reach out for professional help.

Going inpatient for a little while can get you temporarily out of a hard situation so that you have a bit of time to regroup, to reassess, to rest, to recuperate, and to reevaluate. Yet an inpatient stay at the hospital usually won't solve your problems.

A 72-hour hold won't get you out of a hard situation. When you get out of the hospital, you'll face the very same challenges you did before you went in.

For someone acclimated to help from the psychiatric care system, when life gets too hard it might be tempting to head for the nearest inpatient care ward. It is nice to think we could just be helpless and have the hard work of life done for us. It's never as simple as that.


You will have to relinquish some of your rights. Hospital staff will often make decisions for you. If you need the help, you should certainly go. But it can be hard to ask for help.

Speaking to a family member and/or a psychiatric advice nurse could be an effective way to determine whether you need an inpatient stay. If it is too difficult to do simple self-care, such as going to a store and getting food or other necessities, or cleaning up after yourself, it might just mean you should get a helping professional to help you with some of it. Or, if it gets bad enough, you might need to get a greater amount of help.
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My sister recommended the book Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman. The New York Times review called the book, “Riveting… A superbly written tale of moral courage and political courage for present day readers who find themselves in similarly dark times.”

Riveting is the best word to describe Freedman’s writing. The Berkeley library has one hard copy and the Oakland library has the ebook.

My memory of Hubert Humphrey is his support of the Vietnam War, the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention, and losing the 1968 presidential election to Nixon, who promised to end the war and then continued it for four more years until after he was safely re-elected.

Humphrey’s pivotal role on civil rights was completely lost under the weight of Vietnam.

I knew nothing about Humphrey’s early political life, especially how he addressed racism and anti-Semitism in Minneapolis as mayor, or how he changed history with his firm stand on civil rights in 1948. I associated the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Act signed by President Johnson in 1964. Humphrey’s place in civil rights starts long before becoming Johnson’s Vice President on January 20, 1965.

The book title comes from Humphrey’s speech on July 14, 1948, at the Democratic National Convention. The issue was not whether the delegates would nominate President Truman for a second term, but whether the Democrats would include civil rights in the official party platform. Humphrey had 10 minutes to speak for the minority and convince the delegates to support the platform on civil rights. Here is an excerpt:

“To those of you, my friends who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them, we are 172 years late.

To those who say, to those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this, that the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” -more-

In my previous article posted on December 2, I outlined a proposal for a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine. Now I wish to show why now is the right time for such a two-state solution to be considered by both Israelis and Palestinians. First, the popularity of Benjamin Netanyahu is at an all-time low in Israel. The man who posed as Mr. Security for Israel has been seen as ignoring or otherwise failing to heed warnings that Hamas was capable of mounting such an attack as they did on October 7. Compound this failure on Netanyahu’s part with Israeli citizens’ enormous opposition to their prime minister’s assault on Israel’s judiciary, and you have a situation where Netanyahu may finally be toppled from power. In recent polls, 41 per cent of Israelis want Benny Gantz to be the next prime minister, as opposed to only 21 per cent who want Netanyahu to remain in office. Finally, Netanyahu’s current extreme right-wing coalition can be toppled by any of its coalition members withdrawing their support. People close to Benny Gantz have been urging him to withdraw his support and thereby topple the Netanyahu coalition. -more-

The cover of a recent New Yorker was a cleverish Barry Blitt caricature of four old folks running a race while pushing the kind of aluminum walkers used by mobility challenged people of all ages. Since I’m currently one of them (having been in bed with a broken ankle for a month) I sympathize. Apparently we’re supposed to snicker at these runners because they’re still involved in electoral races even though they’re kinda sorta (OMG) old.

Otherwise, they’re not that much alike.

From left to right:, visually, not politically:

Donald Trump. No need to say more about him—we know too much already.

Mitch McConnell: A canny political operator, wrong on most issues by my standards, but clever.

Nancy Pelosi: Another super clever politician, but good on most important questions.

Joe Biden: In his current incarnation, quite adept at identifying and promoting effective policies. He hasn’t always been so great, but he’s learned a lot on his journey.

A diverse set, but the common denominator is that they’re all now, well, old.

Luckily, Dianne Feinstein was not part of the group, which could have proved embarrassing.

New Yorker Editor David Remnick’s Talk of the Town comments in the same issue are headed “This Old Man” in print, “The Washington Gerontocracy” online. Pretty clearly, Remnick (b.1958) views with alarm some data he’s selected from assorted polls. He worries that “more than seventy per cent of respondents suggested that Biden is too old to be effective in a second term”.

The New Yorker, even before Remnick, has traditionally hoped that it caters to the youngster market, but I doubt that’s true. I only have anecdotes to support my opinion, but these are sometimes better than the data-lite often featured in glossy magazines like The New Yorker.

Harold Ross, its original editor, is often quoted in an urban legend as saying that his brainchild was “not for the little old lady in Dubuque.”

Well, maybe, but I learned to read it from my mother, born 1914 in St.Louis, which is probably more sophisticated than Dubuque ever was, but is not Manhattan, She missed out on college because of the Depression, but made up for it by being a voracious reader of the kind of snappy prose that the New Yorker has always favored. She claimed that the main advantage to not being employed outside home most of her married life was having first crack at the latest issue when it came in the mail, before my father got home from his office. She read every one of them until she died, finally a little old lady at almost 99,

I (b.1940) was rumored to have taught myself to read when I was about 5 with New Yorker cartoons, in those days funnier than the dreary self-centered ones in the current issues. I’d moved on to the heavier stuff by 1958, which was the year I started college and Remnick was born.

New York City has always been populated by the impecunious young and the rich old, and the magazine has reflected that, especially its ads. I would not be in the least surprised to learn that a stunningly high percentage of the New Yorker’s readers,young and old, poor and rich, have voted for Biden and will do so again.

John Lanchester in the latest London Review of Books in a great piece about how numbers are weaponized in politics says this:: -more-