​According to news reports on Sunday, July 15, our president, Donald Trump, has once again attacked our journalists and our news media and called them “the enemy of the people.” If it were not for my tendency to actually read the news from many sources and fact check information that I receive along with my fellow Americans on a daily basis, perhaps I could believe the words of our president. But truth be told, there are so many ways to accurately check facts in our world which show so much actual evidence of President Donald Trump’s continuing to voice false and inaccurate information in an effort to cloud the reality about us, that I am unable to conclude anything other than our president is a disgrace to our nation.
 
To all of us in American, we need to understand that the questions surrounding our current president have nothing to do with the political and social differences that exist among our fellow citizens. Rather, it has to do with whether or not we have a president who has chosen to disregard the ethical and moral boundaries of his position.
 
One of my country’s major strengths, freedom of the press, is found in the First Amendment of our United States Constitution. Said Amendment reads as follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
 
Our current president has knowingly been attempting to destroy our press in public through his constant tweeting and voiced statements essentially claiming that fake news is all that we are getting from our journalists and news media. I will never deny that on occasion, we have experienced inappropriate reporting by individual members of our press corps, but our history has shown us that our American press has been a positive influence on the survival of our current democracy through their mostly honest reporting, and it is up to “We The People” to defend all that makes us great including freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of the press.

In recent days, I have listened to a number of religious leaders, during interviews on major news television shows, calling upon their fellow religious leaders of all faiths to come forward and speak up for their ethical and moral beliefs. One of their main arguments revolves around their belief that if one truly believes that God created all of humankind, then it is the duty of God’s true believers to actually act like a community and stand up for each and every one of our fellow humans. Let us judge our fellow humans based not upon the color of their skin, the name of their religion or the site of their nationality, but on their actual daily actions and deeds and on how they behave with everyone around us. 
 
We in America can be proud of much that we as a country have done during our history, but it is important to acknowledge that we also are responsible for incredibly negative behaviors including slavery, segregation and the inappropriate internment of Americans during World War II simply because of from where they came. If we truly are a nation committed to doing the right thing for one and all, then it is up to our religious leaders and to all of our fellow Americans who claim to believe in and to follow the will of God to do more than just echo the words of beliefs. It is time for us all to actually be with each other in search of the fair and decent solutions that will help all of us to be better people and have better lives.

I am hopeful that the Solomon Jones’ commentary in The Philadelphia Inquirer on the Kerner Report of 50 years ago and on the recent update of that report which deals with the challenge confronting America to deal with and cure our racist history and the racist issues that continue to undermine our country will spark our nation to truly examine the issue and come up with solutions that can repair the negatives that our country, from hundred of years ago to the present, both created and failed to cure.
 
It is true that slavery and legalized segregation are no longer a burden on our nation’s existence. Having said that, the people of color in our country of America continue to face challenges connected to our racist past that limit their ability to achieve what so many others in our country are able to do. In the same way that scientists work through research to discover cures for cancers and all sorts of diseases, our nation must begin to sit down with each other to review the facts, the actual reality of the signs that created racism in America and the existence of said human germs that continue to plague persons of color in our country. 
 
Look around us. Some of the brightest and most wonderful people in the world, in America and elsewhere, happen to be a part of the community of people of color. But the fact that this American community still suffers in far greater and in so many ways only proves that the challenges that America created for our people of color with slavery and legalized segregation still exist for too many of this community, and the nation that created the problems in the first place should be obligated to actually do the work and research to remedy said problem.

​To the writer of the letter saying of President Trump that "no other president has been so disrespectfully treated", I have two suggestions. First, read your history dating back to our very first president. Second, take time to read the litany of President Trump's tweets that have been incredibly disparaging of men and women in America and throughout our world.
 
Like the writer, I too have expressed a belief that we in America spend too much time talking about our president and too little time talking with each other about the issues most important to our country. But truth be told, our current president's tendency to send out many inappropriate tweets on a daily basis is himself a part of the reason why my country spends more time than necessary on thinking about our president and less time than we should be spending trying to fix the problems that our country currently faces.

​There has to be a way for our United States of America to sit down and solve our problem with North Korea. Given our own number of nuclear weapons and the number of other nations that also have nuclear weapons, I do not believe that another nation adding said weapons to it's arsenal is an acceptable reason for America to consider the idea of initiating, on it's own, a war against said nation and calling it a preventive war.
 
If we have learned anything from our history over the past six decades, it is that our several preventive war efforts in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have only made matters worse for America and for the world. 

​I very much appreciated Solomon Jones’ words and thoughts in our local Philadelphia Inquirer about Philadelphia Rapper Meek Mill, who was recently sentenced to two to four years in prison by Common Pleas Court Judge Genece Brinkley for repeated parole violations (“Don’t let Mill blind us to the real problem,” Nov. 16) Jones said the hundreds who protested Mill’s sentence believed he was the target of a “black judge with a personal grudge and a racist criminal justice system that targets young black men.”
 
Our country, indeed, throughout our history, has yet to acknowledge the problems we have created through hundreds of years of slavery and over one hundred years of segregation.
 
Yes, it is true that we have made some gains in the area of race relations as a nation as shown by our ability to finally elect a man of color to be our president, and by the presence of so many fine people of color who, in America, teach, serve our nation in so many ways, author fine books and contribute in many ways to the world of science and other areas.
 
But, in my opinion, we have, as a nation, ignored our responsibility to sit down together as a full community to come up with solutions and funding that would allow for us, as a nation, to overcome the challenges and obstacles that America created and that continue to plague our American people of color.

​I don’t deny that I have some strong concerns about our current president based upon a considerable amount of factual evidence before me. For me, the evidence includes our president’s claim that investigators he had sent to Hawaii had found important evidence that Trump would eventually release, that supported Trump’s claim that President Obama was not born in America. No such information was ever produced and in 2016, after more than a few years of Donald Trump pushing this claim, Donald Trump finally acknowledged that President Obama was indeed an American citizen.
 
There are so many other examples over many years of how Donald Trump would make claims about issues and people but never once follow through with his promise to provide to the American public the evidence to support his claims. When faced with sexual assault allegations by numerous women, Donald Trump insisted that he would drag said women into court to prove that he was innocent. To this day, Mr. Trump has not lived up to this vow.
 
But rather than speak about specific politicians these days, I prefer to focus on issues, specific topics like our American healthcare system, our American tax policies, the current status of our American infrastructure of roads and bridges, our public education systems, the state of our relationships with our allies and the current growth of the gap between our most wealthy Americans and the poor and middle class of our country.
 
In my view, we Americans have to wonder why too many of our allies have healthcare systems that allow for access to healthcare to all of their citizens at less than half the cost that we in America face. Why are our roads and bridges falling apart and not being repaired and expanded, as they should be? Why are our lowest paid Americans making less than 50% of what their predecessors were making back in 1950 while CEOs and top management people are making three hundred times what the average worker earns in our country.
 
My America, from the very beginning of our time, has always been a mix of capitalism with socialist imprints, and for the most part, it has worked for the benefit of us all. But today, we appear, in my view, to be moving away from our positive history, and in so doing, bringing upon ourselves challenges, that if not overcome, will significantly damage us in the same way that ever other great power before us suffered severe damages.

I worry about my America given our current and very recent history. Back in 2009 as President Obama was about to begin his first days in office, Senator Mitch McConnell told the American People that he saw his job as one requiring him to make certain that our then President Obama would serve out his term in office with not one piece of success. And now, eight years later, we have a new president, a president who spends too much of his time attempting to smear our former President Obama and to undermine every one of his successes. 
 
It matters nothing to President Trump that President Obama, who wanted healthcare for all in America, when he could not have his preferred plan, took the conservative plan called the Affordable Care Act, a plan that assured that insurance companies would remain in the loop and prosper from it. And what happened when the Affordable Care Act became the law of our land and provided for millions of uninsured Americans to gain such coverage? What happened was the people who created the plan suddenly hated it because President Obama had brought it to life.
 
And the Iran nuclear deal brought about to try and change Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons and signed on by not only America, but by many of our allies and other world powers? To hear President Trump speak, you would think that he, a man who never served a day in his life on the battlefield and for our military, now prefers to consider a preemptive war putting American lives on the line rather than working with our allies and fellow signers for the Iran deal to see if it actually will work.
 
My America was such a different place back in the 1940s, and thankfully so. When we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, we actually came together as a nation and overcame World War Two. Do we really believe today, that divisiveness and incivility will carry us through to a better place? I continue to hope for the best, to hope that my country will finally come back to its roots as described in our Declaration of Independence and in our American Constitution and continue to work on behalf of all America, of each and every one of us.
 

​I very much appreciated Harold Jackson’s column in the Philadelphia Inquirer regarding the issue of illegal drugs in America. I think he does make a case that it is time for our country to focus, not on the criminalization of drugs as a way of solving our national drug problem, but on the problem and the people who suffer from it. And missing from Mr. Jackson’s column was, for me, the strongest argument for leaving the criminalization method.
 
In 1920, America entered into the age of Prohibition that made it illegal to transport and sell alcoholic beverages within the United States. This era lasted for 13 years, and at the end, all that this phase did for our nation was to create a catastrophe in the form of organized crime and a significant increase in murder and other forms of criminal activity.
 
I continue to harbor the hope that someday, my country will cease it’s efforts to win what has long been a failure at a war on drugs, and begin to search for remedies that will eventually help those who find themselves caught in the midst of inappropriate alcohol and drug use.