Our environment is under attack. We have a president who wants to turn back the clock 50 years and undo decades of work that made the planet cleaner, safer, and healthier.  He doesn’t believe in global warming. He appointed an EPA Secretary who wants to essentially destroy the department. He wants to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. He wants to bring back coal. He wants to shrink the size of National Monuments to allow for development and mining. The world’s largest salmon fishing area in Bristol Bay, Alaska is being threatened by a mining company that says it sits in an area that could hold the largest gold and copper deposits in the world. The Gulf of Mexico has gotten two degrees warmer which allows for bigger, stronger hurricanes like Harvey that is crashing into Texas this weekend. Looking at the big picture can be too overwhelming. But we all have a level of personal responsibility.

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It’s been two and half years since the initial reconnection was made. My brother mentioned that a childhood friend, who lived across the street from us, had asked about me in a Facebook group. When I joined the group, I received a friend request from my cousin Regina, who was also part of the group. These were the first steps in restoring 45 lost years. My father came from a large Italian family. He was one of five. Together they had 19 children. I am the oldest grandchild. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, we saw each other all the time. We would spend birthdays and holidays together. My father and his older brother Frank bought a two family house together in 1954. Frank and his wife Gloria and their seven kids lived downstairs, and we lived upstairs. Regina is Frank’s second oldest child. But, everything changed during my college years.

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It started with a unexpected invitation to Ireland, and a seventeen year old letter. My brother-in-law was renting a cottage in Adare, and asked Maureen and I to come and spend a week. We had been to Ireland back in 2000 on a tour. My mother’s cousin Joe and his wife Mary were living in Moyvane, County Kerry. My parents had visited them back in 1974. My mother gave me a letter Mary had written to her with Mary’s phone number. I called back then and spoke to Joe while we were on a tour stop. But we weren’t able to get away to visit them. Fortunately, I saved the letter.

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When you travel by ship, you move into a new community. But there are two segments to the population, those on vacation and those who are working. They can take you around the world from the Midwest to Manila. The majority of the crew was from the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Ryan, a bartender from the Philippines, has been on the ship for almost ten months. He missed the birth of his son back in February, and has yet to hold him. He Face Times at night with his school teacher wife, and tries to get his son to react to his voice. He will be home for three months, and then be off again on another long cruise.

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Alaska is about man and nature living in harmony. In the 1970s, when the country started to understand the importance of protecting and saving the environment, the Alaskan commercial fisherman and the government joined together to save the salmon for themselves and future generations. Our last stop in Ketchikan is “The Salmon Capital of the World”. You can see clearly what’s being done on a visit to the Macaulay Hatchery in the capital of Juneau where they breed millions of salmon and release them into the bay. You can over look a tank with millions of tiny salmon as they start a life cycle that regenerates the population for future generations. Commercial fisherman will tell you they never want to catch all the salmon in these waters. They always want to come back for more.

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The vastness is what you notice first. We started up the Inside Passage from Vancouver, British Columbia at 7pm. The ocean was still. The wind was bracing. The sky was streaked with clouds against that sky blue that only nature can achieve. It’s hard to tell how far away the mountains are in the distance. The peaks of brown and gray edge the horizon, and make you feel you haven’t actually left the earth. On the first night, I watched the sun set late and last over North America. It wasn’t totally dark until almost ten o’clock. The atmosphere is silent accept for the wind which seems to blow in waves as the ship pushes north.

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“The second day of July, 1776-will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America…It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.” John Adams wrote this in a letter to his wife Abigail about the day the Second Continental Congress voted to approve a resolution of independence. Of course, the Declaration of Independence wasn’t actually adopted until July 4th. So Adams jumped the gun by two days. But he set the standard about how Americans should celebrate the most important day in our history. We should feel good and proud about ourselves as a country and a society. We are the standard for the rest of the whole to emulate.

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It was sad to see the messy ending of Scott Pelley’s six year run as Anchor and Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News last week. Pelley went out with class and dignity thanking the people of CBS News for all their hard work, and saying he knows it will continue. Pelley will devote his considerable reporting skills to 60 Minutes. The whole affair seemed to be handled poorly. Leaks started months ago that Pelley was out. There were stories about he and CBS News President David Rhodes not getting along. Reports Rhodes didn’t like Pelley’s style. Pelley’s office being cleaned out while he was on assignment in Syria possibly at Pelley’s own request. There is much we don’t know. Having dealt with anchors during my career, some can require full time management. Pelley is an old school, hard news reporter in the CBS tradition of Edward R. Morrow, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Mike Wallace. His newscast were serious and tough, and he did some of the best reporting himself on the big stories. The person who is picked to replace Pelley will have a big seat to fill at a critical time for journalism and the country.

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It was a speech all Americans should hear. I first read about it in a column in the New York Times by Op-Ed writer Frank Bruni. It was given last week by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. He was explaining the removal of four monuments honoring the President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and General P.G.T. Beauregard, and the Battle of Liberty Place which stood in public places in New Orleans. There were demonstrations and confrontations for and against the removal. There was some violence. Workers removing the monuments even wore protective vets and masks for fear of relatiation. One statue was removed in the middle of the night. Mayor Landrieu had fought for a year to get city and state governments and the courts to agree to take the monuments down because it was the right thing to do.

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“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.” These are the words of Founding Father Samuel Adams. While spoken over 200 years ago, they echo the truth of today. How did we get here? Our division and mistrust of each other and our government has put us in the hands of a man that reflects the worst in us. Truth and facts are no longer a sure thing. The people in charge can’t even get history right. Trump saying Andrew Jackson, who died 15 years before it started, could have settled the Civil War. His Press Secretary saying even Hitler didn’t use chemicals on his victims. These are just two examples of the ignorance that we have come to expect from the people in charge. Misquoting and not understanding history often makes us repeat mistakes, and blinds us when we need to see clearly.

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