Author: Common Dreams

“The vet in the mirror may be wounded in the soul—and it is your duty to carry this one last vet for help.” – Roland Van Deusen This is not an easy reach – into the soul of the loneliest man or woman on Earth, which is the definition of everyone who is on the brink of committing suicide. For decades, Roland Van Deusen has been reaching out to a particularly endangered subgroup of such people: abandoned veterans, left with nothing but their own traumatic memories, their shame and guilt. The “vet in the mirror” quote comes from a...

Choice. It is what we all want in America. We rail against being told how to run our lives, especially by the government. But when it comes to health insurance, choice is an illusion and you do not really know what you are getting. With the COVID-19 pandemic straining our healthcare system beyond its capacity, this mirage of choice is coming back to bite us. Many Americans with COVID-19 will not get their testing and treatment covered because the plan they chose doesn’t fully cover this kind of care. If you are fortunate enough to be insured by one...

As a general principle, we try to hold our public officials liable for acts of gross negligence and reckless disregard for human life. So, what about Donald Trump? Could he one day be held liable, either civilly or criminally, for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans who have succumbed to the lethal, novel coronavirus known as COVID-19? Trump has taken actions that place his constituency—the American people—in mortal danger on a scale that could have been reduced had he acted reasonably and promptly to contain and mitigate the dangers of the virus. Among other acts of recklessness...

As the novel coronavirus pandemic makes in-person voting inherently dangerous in the United States, as demonstrated by the disastrous contests in Wisconsin earlier this month, rights groups and experts are advocating a nationwide vote-by-mail system as the only safe and fair way to conduct the nation’s hugely consequential November elections. But President Donald Trump, who is up for re-election, appears hell-bent on killing the beloved government institution that would be essential to implementing universal mail-in voting: the U.S. Postal Service. Trump has been an outspoken opponent of mail-in voting for everyone but himself, explicitly threatened to veto the multi-trillion-dollar...

For most Americans alive today, the idea of shared national sacrifice is a collective abstraction, a memory handed down from a grandparent or passed on through a book or movie. Not since World War II, when people carried ration books with stamps that allowed them to purchase meat, sugar, butter, cooking oil and gasoline, when buying cars, firewood and nylon was restricted, when factories converted from making automobiles to making tanks, Jeeps and torpedoes, when men were drafted and women volunteered in the war effort, has the entire nation been asked to sacrifice for a greater good. The civil...