Columns

It’s hard to imagine what public health would look like around here without the Healthcare Foundation of Northern Sonoma County.

Who was that praying for all the rain? Are you done yet? Wait, maybe we should remind ourselves where we live and what our flood and drought history tells us.

As I sat down to write this I was recalling what I wrote last year at this time.

This newspaper publisher has long been predisposed to remind his readers that there is no such thing as a free press. It takes money, lots of it, to hire dedicated journalists and buy newsprint, ink and computers to produce news. It cost Sonoma West Publishers just over $1.2 million last year to provide a steady stream of vital and reliable news for the four communities we serve in north and west Sonoma County. And, even with all that, we still lost almost $200,000 at the end of the year. Now, during the pandemic-caused economic shutdown, our financial challenge looks nearly impossible some days. But that’s another story for another day.

“The Last Lion, Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1847-1932,” by William Manchester. 973 pages, illustrated. Volume I of his detailed biography gives us the years of his early education, the pathos of his neglect by both parents (his American mother an adventuress and courtesan of the Prince of Wales and future King of England, but influential in promoting her son into an ambitious career), and his time as head of the British navy – and as general busybody in preparing all the armed forces for the onslaught of the Great War in Europe. The vast scope of his life includes an informative picture of the social conditions of his time and creates a large canvas of the world in war and peace, leading us to: “The Last Lion, Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965,” wherein this leading figure is considered to have saved civilization from the madness of the Teutonic hordes which had again overrun Europe in their quest for lebensraum and Aryan purity. His own search for help as England  underwent a blitzkrieg of rocket bombs brought him into constant meetings with Franklin Roosevelt and later Josef Stalin before the final end to the hostilities. In all, the books bring us into contact with a wide cast of world characters equal to any you might find in all the annals of war and peace. Just read it.

A discussion about free trade versus tariffs raises all sort of choices, conflicts and conundrums. We’re not talking about forging steel, smelting aluminum or processing Trumpisms. Here, we do wine and beer, tourism, water exports, clean energy distribution, medical technology and don’t forget cannabis, among all our other potential imports and exports.

The eagerly awaited visit from the Pittsburgh family has come and gone in the blink of an eye. One minute we were making plans to pick them up from SFO, and the next thing we knew, we were loading them up to return to the airport.