The goal of all writers is to get people to read what you write. When you self publish, there are no agents, or publishers helping you get your book out there. It’s all up to you. That means tell every family member and friend, try not to be obnoxious about it, that you’ve written a book they can easily buy on line. Use social media. Try to get a local bookstore to sell it. I’ve checked all those boxes, but it was time to make a pitch in person to people I didn’t know, a Meet the Author-Book Signing. You have to put yourself out there, even though you risk standing in a room with a pile of books, and no one shows up. With the help of Pete, the head of the Social Committee in my community, we set one up at the clubhouse.

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At first, I was surprised. Then, I was angry. I was kneeling on a grassy patch by the curb  on the corner of our house at the Jersey shore. It was a couple of days after 9/11. Local school kids had planted small American flags in the ground on just about every corner to commemorate the day. They were those small flags attached to a wooden stick with a gold point on top. My wife noticed it had fallen over the night before. She picked it up, and stuck it in a flower pot in the front yard. The ground by the street was packed hard, and the flag wouldn’t stay. She asked me to dig a better hole the next morning.

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The beginning of September used to mean the last holiday weekend of summer, back to school, the beginning of fall, and the kickoff off the football season. It’s still means all those things, but there is also the shadow of the day that changed everything. That bright, blue sky Tuesday morning was shattered by the unthinkable terror of crashes, explosions, fire, death, and mountains of smoldering rubble that are still killing firefighters and police officers today. It shocked us like no other event in our history. We were vulnerable. How could this happen? How could we not stop it before the plot got off the ground? It made us afraid.

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I was 18 years old on the summer Sunday night 50 years ago when man landed on the moon. I was in my father’s office at ABC News where he worked as the Assignment Manager. I was working down the street as a summer Desk Assistant at WABC Eyewitness News. He was behind his desk as Neil Armstrong descended the steps of the lunar module. He instinctively reached for a pen, and began to write on a small pad, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, as the words came out of Armstrong’s mouth. I guess it was his newsman’s instinct. It was something that the millions of people around the world watching would remember. While it was one of great accomplishments in history, it was also the last great, good thing we did together.

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Everyone wants to win. To quote former New York Jets coach Herm Edwards, “You play to win the game.” A win, a great play, a goal are reason to celebrate. Not so fast. The Women’s World Cup has raised the issue among some that celebrating can go too far, and seem “arrogant”, overboard, and unsportswoman-like. It started when the US women beat Thailand 13-0 and didn’t let up when the game was clearly out of hand, and they had the nerve to continue to celebrate after every goal. Have you ever watched a men’s soccer match? After every goal there is the long knee slide, the running around the field, arms flailing, hugging teammates. And this is after every goal in every regular season game. This is not once every four years like the World Cup where some of these woman get one or two chances in their life to compete in a world wide championship for their country.

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This week we will celebrate the last 4th of July of the second decade of the 21st Century when we are all suppose to feel good about our country, and just be grateful to be Americans. These first two decades of the new century have changed that feeling as much as any twenty year period in our history, and it should make us question who we are, and what it means to be an American. The traumatic start of the 21st century may have actually started in the last years of the 20th century when we lived through the impeachment of a president for lying about a sexual relationship with a young intern. Sound familiar? But that seemed to fade away as we were worried about Y2K. Remember? Then we had the 2000 election that was decided by hanging chads and the Supreme Court.

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I get more embarrassed when Donald Trump leaves the country, and the rest of the world can see him close up. It’s cringeworthy to see him on the world stage. You can’t help but wonder what other world leaders are thinking when they have to meet with him, and then pose for the photo opp. The past two days the western world commemorated the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. The pictures and stories of the 90 year old men who saved the world by charging through withering gunfire, icy waves, and the blood of fellow soldiers when they were so young can bring tears to all of us. It’s at these emotional and historic events when Trump is at his worst, and that’s saying something.

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It’s back. After over ten years, Court TV has returned to television both over the air and on cable through Katz Networks, a division of E.W. Scripps Company. I was part of a group of journalists in the summer of 1991, who took founder Steve Brill’s idea to cover trials live, and created a form of legal journalism that hadn’t been seen before. We covered criminal trials, civil trials, parole hearings, international war crimes trials, and the most famous Senate confirmation hearing in modern US history. We couldn’t have picked a better time to bring citizens inside American courtrooms so they could see how the system, that was hidden from most of us, really worked.

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It sounds ridiculous. It’s obviously redundant. I heard it again recently, this time by a network news correspondent. She’s not the only one. It says something about the state of television news writing and editing. It falls in line with our tendency to emphasis to the extreme. It’s not just television news reporters, we all do it. “Falling down”, “exactly the same”, “completely full”, “past history”, we’re all guilty. But, “armed gunmen” has taken on a deeper more terrifying meaning. It seems as if we hear it every few weeks. It makes us stop and think “Oh, no. How bad will it be this time?” “Gunman” or “gunmen” doesn’t seem to be an adequate description in this era of mass shootings. It’s infected the very way we talk about guns.

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No one wanted to go to the theater that night. General Ulysses S. Grant said no because his wife couldn’t stand Mrs. Lincoln. They made the excuse that they were going to New Jersey to visit their children. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, and even President Lincoln’s own son Robert turned down the invitation to go to Ford’s Theater on the night of April 14, 1865 to see “Our American Cousin.” Mary Lincoln had a headache and would have preferred to stay home. Lincoln said they had to go because the newspapers had reported that they would be at the theater that night, and he didn’t want to disappoint the audience. Lincoln’s bodyguard William Crook urged him to stay home. Crook didn’t accompany the president that night. A man named John Frederick Parker was going to act as presidential bodyguard. Finally, Clara Harris, daughter of New York Senator Ira Harris, and her fiancé Major Henry Rathbone agreed to accompany the president and his wife to the theater.

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