If You Ask Me

Those of us who came of age around the middle of the last century remember with sorrow and horror the annual polio plagues and the fear of getting polio, also known as infantile paralysis, a crippling disease that impacted our growing up summers.

On Tuesday, July 6, the Hartford Courant did not have an editorial/opinion page. This is something I had never seen in reading the newspaper nearly every day as a customer, employee, competitor, contributor, critic and admirer since coming to Connecticut 63 years ago.

How often have you heard people say how proud they are that their ancestors who migrated to this country long ago came here “legally,” unlike those terrible illegals today.

When a 17-year-old driving a stolen Audi was arrested in New Britain after he killed a jogger in a hit-and-run late last month, we learned the teenager had been arrested 13 times in the past three years but had never been tried or otherwise disciplined for crimes ranging from reckless driving to assault with a knife.

After sending American troops into Afghanistan right after 9/11 to destroy the perpetrator Osama bin Laden, his terrorist group, al Qaeda, and their Afghan ally, the Taliban, the United States has ended the 20-year war after reaching just two of those three goals.

After seven years of trying and failing, the 2021 Connecticut General Assembly followed 18 other states in legalizing the possession and sale of marijuana.  

It’s far too early for any sensible observer of the political scene to be talking about presidential possibilities in the 2024 election, so let’s do it anyway.

“Not freedom for the thought of those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.”