I haven’t written anything for a while. It’s dispiriting when the torrent of outrages comes so quickly and relentlessly that it’s difficult to keep up. I start to write about one thing, and before I can finish something equally bad—or worse—comes along leaving my work in the dust.

We had the Iranian downing of an American drone fiasco; the on-again, off-again deportation raids; the “warning” to Putin not to interfere in our elections; the threat to levy tariffs on Mexico; the meeting with Kim Jong-un which once again enhanced his prestige while producing nothing in return; tolerating murderous dictators around the world; the Fourth of July spectacle at the Lincoln Monument at a cost of millions; the revolving door of departing administration officials, many leaving under a cloud; the xenophobic suggestion that four non-white female freshman members of Congress should “go back where they came from,” and on and on.

From the outset, the danger that the current President has posed has been that we become inured to his behavior and meet his latest outrage with a shrug. We can’t allow that to happen. We can’t let ourselves  accept this current state of affairs as normal.

Meanwhile, our highways remain potholed; our airports are an embarrassment; our ports are incapable of handling 21^stCentury shipping; our rail system is state of the art for the turn of the 20^thCentury; hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bridges across the country are either dangerous or in desperate need of maintenance and repair; we face a health crisis with the increasing frequency of anti-biotic resistant bacteria; jobs go begging because we don’t have enough workers to fill them; our birth rate is below replacement level, and college is becoming unaffordable for millions of high school graduates just when post-secondary education is becoming essential to maintain a skilled workforce.

The hot Democratic candidates for President—Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and maybe Bernie Sanders—fantasize about programs we can’t afford while failing to address the more pressing issues confronting us.

Sixty years ago John Kennedy ran on a program to get America “moving again”. We need that now.