Kevin O'Keefe
Trump tells the truth ... twice
According to The Washington Post, President Donald Trump has made close to 11,000 false or misleading statements in less than 1,000 days in office.
Why can't the press call out a lie by a lying liar anymore? The running tally does not include the waffles, untruths, inaccuracies, backtracks, and self-congratulations of the president or the lies of his spokespeople - Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Our house is on fire
We listened to teens at their recent strike for climate change. But did we hear them?
If you're over 50 (as I am) and a citizen (me, too), would you consider admitting that we have failed our children? We've failed them on preventing, or at least curbing, gun violence. We've failed them by loading them with crushing debt - just add college expenses and the...
Grab the popcorn
The president’s character traits would make him fascinating to play or to observe in a movie or play, but they make him an impossible-to-look-away-from train wreck as the leader of our country
I was a professional actor in New York City for 20 years. At the same theater and within a matter of months I played two very different characters. One was a white supremacist, and the other a compassionate angel. Like many other actors the bad guy was more fun...
More
Climate-change solutions needed, both on local and national scale
I read both pieces on climate change [“A huge national problem merits a huge national solution” and “As climate change prods, tugs, and gnaws, what's a parent to do?”] in the Nov. 28 issue. While one looked to big government for sweeping change to our policies, the other pointed toward local solutions offered in community response networks like Mother Up! Both are needed. The local option is more accessible and able to change the inner landscape quite quickly. Just reading...
S.O.S. from inside the West Wing
When we were teens, my siblings and I shared a hand signal for when our mother had been drinking. It was a mimed gesture of a beer can going quickly to the mouth. Other kids of alcoholics probably share signals like this - ways to deal with their parents' erratic behaviors, quick workarounds to avoid conflict and maintain denial about “the problem.” My father was sober by then and probably should've known better. He got into Alcoholics Anonymous when I...
Riding on the Trump roller coaster
I don't enjoy roller coasters - never have, not since I went on one that looked like a giant squid at Rye Playland when I was about 10 or 11. I can still recall the sickly smell of cotton candy, salty air, and humidity that greeted me as they opened the door to let us out of the cage we banged around in for three minutes. I felt as though I was walking on marbles until I white-knuckled the railing...
Shaving cuts
Excuse me while I grouse about a petty problem while promising to connect it to something more meaningful to all. I walked into my local Rite Aid pharmacy today. In the shaving section, I encountered a grizzled man about my age - I'm 59 - holding a plastic razor handle with no blade. He blankly stared in obvious confusion at the razor display case. Noticing that I was there for the very same reason we started to commiserate. He peppered...
Life principle
Back in the early 1990s, I was a teacher at a junior high school for the arts in East Harlem, N.Y. There was an elementary school in our building as well. It was a dangerous time and place. If the weather was good, I rode my bike - at a very crisp pace - to school. If I took the subway from my apartment in SoHo, I sprinted the three blocks from the subway station to the school. One day,