Columnists

Women finally got a piece of the action in 1920. Passage of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution provided American women with full voting rights fifty years after all American men were enabled to vote. Sixteen other nations had already guaranteed women this right.

August 26^th is designated as Women's Equality Day to commemorate this event. Women’s Equality Day is officially proclaimed in some locales. It was instituted by Congressional Representative Bella Abzug (1920-1998) when she was 60 years old. Women and girls have come a long way but there is still much work to be done to achieve true equity. Women’s Equality Day is not on the calendars of the Berkeley public library, the City of Berkeley, nor Berkeley senior centers. -more-

On August 17th, Donald Trump once again shook up his campaign. While there were early indications that Trump would “soften” his image, these were refuted by the August 19th release of his first general election campaign ad “Two Americas: Immigration”. This TV ad stems from the same darkness that fueled Trump’s acceptance speech: bigotry and hate. -more-

By mid-morning on August 12, more than a foot of rain had fallen near Kentwood, Louisiana, in just a 12-hour stretch — a downpour with an estimated likelihood of just once every 500 years, and roughly three months’ worth of rainfall during a typical hurricane season. It’s the latest in a string of exceptionally rare rainstorms that are stretching the definition of “extreme” weather. It’s exactly the sort of rainstorm that’s occurring more frequently as the planet warms. -more-

If you have a life-changing psychiatric illness, the expectation that you can't work a job can be bad for you, yet so can the expectation that you can. Either way, you are dealing with some type of expectation that affects how you perceive yourself. Expectations or judgments that we can or can't work could come from family, from mental health workers or from oneself. -more-