Rumbles From Above, Superman's an Illegal Alien, Native Americans are Immigrants too, Oprah Rejects God's Entreaty

Few things are more disconcerting than hearing a rumbling sound during a snowstorm that shakes the very foundation of your house. Not once but at least six times in the space of 90 minutes the house shook Wednesday afternoon as snow from the upper reaches of our home tumbled down to a lower roof level.

Each rumble transported me back in time, more than three decades ago, when I first heard a similarly unnerving cascade that defied my comprehension. 

Back then Gilda and I, and our infant son Dan, lived in a Tudor style house with a slate roof. After an especially deep snow fall, we were getting ready for bed when the rumbling started, lasting about six seconds. I thought someone had rolled up the garage door and was breaking into our home.

I yelled to Gilda to call the police as I threw on a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt and sneakers, grabbed a baseball bat from the closet and raced outdoors to confront the intruder. 

Outside I saw the garage door had not been opened. I spotted a pile of snow on an otherwise smooth blanket of snow. I looked to the roof and realized the snow had rumbled down the slate. I felt foolish.

But not as concerned as Gilda felt. The police had cautioned her I should not be outside lest they suspect I was the suspected burglar, armed as I was, with a bat. The patrol car arrived just as Gilda opened the front door and screamed for me to get inside.

Not so fast. After due process, the police let me go with an admonition never again to play the brave fool. 

Oscars Followup: Superman was mentioned during the Oscars telecast which got me thinking that despite all the good the caped crusader has performed since 1933, Donald Trump’s Homeland Security authorities would eject him from the United States. 

He is, after all, an undocumented alien. His parents transported him from Krypton to America while still a baby, but he’s too old to be a Dreamer, so he would not be shielded from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). They couldn’t send him back to Krypton as it imploded. They’d have to find a country willing to take someone who “fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way,” not traits readily identified with Trump’s United States. 

Natives, Really? In most conversations, oral and written, about immigrants, legal and illegal, it often is stated that only Native Americans—Indians—did not emigrate to America. 

Oh, really? Let’s be clear: the first settlers of America were immigrants from an as yet undetermined land or lands. Numerous theories abound https://www.voanews.com/a/native-americans-call-for-rethink-of-bering-strait-theory/3901792.html.

Bottom line: Everyone in America is descendant from an immigrant. 

God Couldn’t Talk Her into It: Even an appearance by God on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert couldn’t convince Oprah Winfrey to launch a campaign for the presidency in 2020. The tete-a-tete between titans produced laughs and some real longing by those seeking a cultural change in the White House (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkUKRkN-nTY).

Oprah’s progressive positions are well documented, but she is correct in distancing herself from a political future. She need only gaze at the shattered legacy of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar (Burma) to visualize what her future would be. On Wednesday, a 2012 human rights award she received from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was revoked because of the ongoing mistreatment and massacre of Rohingya Muslims during her reign as Myanmar’s state counsellor (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/us-holocaust-museum-aung-san-suu-kyi_us_5aa022f4e4b0d4f5b66cd500). 

The minute Oprah equivocated on any tenet of progressivism she would be criticized by leftist radicals no less sharply than by conservatives who would be merciless in their everyday abuse. 

Americans do not want their icons tarnished by real world politics. Since politics is supposed to include the art of compromise, Winfrey could not be expected to deliver on all items on her constituents’ wish list. She is better off leaving politics to the politicians while championing causes and rallying voters.  

Mass Shootings, an Intractable Dispute and McConnell's Imprint on Our Future

From a Los Angeles Times article on the killings in Northern California Tuesday: “I thought this only happens to places like L.A. or New York,” Jose Garcia, owner of La Fortune Convenience, told the Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-norcal-elementary-school-shooting-20171114-story.html).

Now, why would he say that? In the 16 deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 1949, not one, not one!, occurred in either Los Angeles or New York City (http://cnn.it/1F5wWwy).

Sadly, mass shootings are part of Americana. They happen in schools, in churches, in McDonalds, in nightclubs, on military bases. But not in New York or Los Angeles. 

Numb. Week after week crazed men and the occasional woman perpetrate numbing acts of violence against innocents, many of whom are children. As a nation we are repulsed. But let’s put our reaction in historical perspective.

From our earliest days as colonists to European monarchs, to our formation as the United States of America, we have rarely done anything but accept, and even condone, mass killings, either on our soil or in foreign lands, by our citizens or other peoples. Consider our treatment of Native Americans. Or the death trips chained Africans endured crossing the Atlantic below decks aboard slave trading ships. Or the way we turned our backs on thousands of desperate souls fleeing Nazi Germany. Or how we mostly ignored the ethnic warfare in Rwanda and the Balkans? 

It is hard to find solace in our historical record. 

From a Sunday New York Times article on Trump administration efforts to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, here’s a quote: “After 10 months of educating themselves on the complexities of the world’s most intractable dispute, White House officials said, Mr. Trump’s team of relative newcomers to Middle East peacemaking has moved into a new phase of its venture  …” (https://nyti.ms/2ji06GG).

Now, Jews for decades have been pleased to be recognized for outstanding feats. Entertainers, scientists, Nobel Prize winners, athletes and so on, including a remarkable victory in the Six Day War, they all evoke cultural pride among the “chosen.” But there is no joy in associating Israel with “the world’s most intractable dispute.” Israel, for one, would argue it has sought peaceful co-existence from day one of its statehood in 1948 and even before. But let’s not argue that point.

I’d rather focus on the highlighted phrase. Should we not consider the friction over Kashmir between Pakistan and India, two nuclear powers, an equally, if not more, intractable, and potentially more dangerous, dispute? What about Korea? What about the Kurds wanting their own country and stifled by Iraq, Turkey and Syria? 

I’m sure there are other hotspots around the globe that could share equal billing with the Israeli-Palestinian discord, so let’s not be so quick to label any dispute the most intractable.

As long as we’re talking Israeli-Palestinian issues, earlier this month, November 2, marked the 100th anniversary of the issuance of the Balfour Declaration that stated the British government’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”  

Rather than go into a dissertation on the history and pros and cons of the document, let me be personal about the Balfour Declaration. Several years ago, as part of my part-time work as a real estate agent, I had the extreme good fortune of seeing a draft of the Balfour Declaration, with handwritten notations and edits, hanging in the home of a client. That was a priceless moment.

He’s the One: Stephen Bannon wants him thrown out of office, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is arguably the politico most responsible for the rightward shift America will undergo for the next several decades.

McConnell’s unprecedented obstruction of judicial nominations during the last year or more of Barack Obama’s presidency has resulted in the appointment of conservative Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and a slew of like-minded jurists to lower federal benches. These lifetime positions will set a reactionary tone for decades putting at risk hope for progressive, humane decisions that favor civil rights and individuals versus corporations and government (https://nyti.ms/2hqRzk3).

The Bannon trope against McConnell is a public relations fight that obscures what is really happening in Washington. Congress may be crawling along but the real deconstruction of government is happening at the cabinet department level where regulation after regulation is being rescinded or amended to eliminate or reduce safeguards intended to protect workers, the environment and consumers.

The avuncular McConnell is a tempting target, in appearance and legislative accomplishment, but keep in mind it was his strategy that made a vote for Trump synonymous with a choice for the next Supreme Court justice. 

Trump's Plan: Invoke Fear, Dehumanize Clinton

From genocide to genocide one constant has been the dehumanization of victims by aggressors. If a victim can be reduced in stature to a level where death can be condoned, killing can be implemented without remorse.

Dehumanization does not have to go to the extreme of a concerted campaign of murder. Slavery or state-sanctioned discrimination can be way-stops with little or no punishment should murder occur now and then.

With its treatment of Native Americans and Afro Americans, White America has engaged in genocide, slavery and discrimination. And now, with their rhetoric, Donald Trump and his Republican advisors and sycophants are pursuing a dehumanizing and demonization campaign against Hispanics, Muslims and Democrats. It is the next step in the Republican Party’s strategy to delegitimize the presidency of the first elected Afro American, from the birther movement to assertions that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim to claims that he clandestinely supports the killing of policemen by blacks.

Trump’s total campaign has been waged not on policy and programs but rather on smear tactics to dehumanize his adversaries. By repeating a verbal description of Hillary Clinton as a criminal and a liar they are undermining her legitimacy as president should she win the election. Trump doesn’t offer a critique of her platform or details about his alternatives other than to say under him life would be great.

Perhaps we should have expected this result. Too many of our entertainment diversions, especially reality shows, pit good against evil. Cooperation is encouraged only as far as it advances one’s own self interest.

Republicans want to paint themselves as the law and order party, Democrats as the party of lawlessness and chaos.

Trump began the assault on normative behavior when he launched his America First campaign with an attack on Mexicans and Muslims. The net effect of his remarks was the unleashing of forces of evil in our society—anti-Semites and racial bigots. By not quickly and forcefully repudiating comments by David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan and neo Nazi extremists, and by knowingly or inadvertently retweeting their screeds, Trump emboldened them. 

Perhaps not coincidentally, Duke announced his intention to run for a U.S. Senate seat from Louisiana Friday. “I’m overjoyed to see Donald Trump and most Americans embrace most of the issues that I’ve championed for years. My slogan remains ‘America First,’” Duke said.

Evil cannot be given fertile soil on which to grow. Yet Trump has been its constant gardener.

The produce of his tolerance of intolerance emerged for all to see during the just concluded Republican National Convention. Trump confidante Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire delegate and state representative, said Clinton should be tried for treason and hung. Or killed by firing squad.

Potential vice presidential candidate and former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich proposed that all Muslims in the United States be required to take a loyalty test as a condition of their continued residence in the country, even if they are U.S. citizens. One wonders how a former university history professor does not know his suggestion is patently unconstitutional.

Another passed over vp hopeful, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, led the assembled delegates in a modern day version of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution when he called upon them to shout “guilty” after he enunciated Clinton’s alleged transgressions as secretary of state. 

New Yorkers remember Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s assault on art he didn’t like, similar to Hitler’s attack on Modern Art, what he called Degenerate Art. Giuliani is another Trump insider. 

Images of a police state come to mind. 

In his acceptance speech Thursday night, Trump said he would suspend immigration from any nation that has been “compromised by terrorism.” Does that mean no one can come here from Belgium or France, for surely those countries at present are nests of opportunity for Islamic terrorists?

There were some winning rhetorical flourishes in his near 75-minute speech. Saying, “I am your voice,” he forcefully drove home the point that he would be the champion of the people, not special interests. But as The New York Times noted in a front page article Friday under a picture of Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, just a few blocks away from the convention hall lobbyists already were feasting on the potential business and influence they would have in a Trump presidency. “Lobbyists cheerfully passed out stickers reading ‘Make Lobbying Great Again,’” The Times reported. http://nyti.ms/29XIbha

Trump also deftly turned Clinton’s campaign motto, “I’m with her,” into a more personal “I’m with you,” again defining himself as the people’s champion.

But his brag that “l alone” could effect change in Washington revealed a major hurdle he would face. He would need Congress to pass legislation that Republicans have not previously embraced. Though his daughter Ivanka, when introducing him, talked about his compassion and generosity for working women, he did not include in his speech any support for measures many women crave: a higher minimum wage, equal pay for equal work, paid sick leave, paid maternity leave, affordable child care. He said he would scrap Obamacare and replace it with something better without providing specifics. Getting any of these programs through a Republican Congress would be a challenge worthy of Hercules.

To almost everything he said he would do he exhorted, “Believe me, believe me.” And that his fixes would happen “quickly.”

Trump promised to deliver a safer America, that he will be the law and order president. Putting aside for now the reality that crime is down in the country, most criminal laws are enforced on the local level, not by the federal government, unless Trump has in mind a national police force that would supersede state and municipal police departments.

Interestingly, Trump did not mention who would pay for the wall he says he will build along the Mexican border. He also did not repeat his vow to deport 11 million illegal aliens. 

The transcendent theme of Trump’s speech was the antithesis of the words on the Statue of Liberty. Instead of “give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Trump wants your angered, your fearful, your resentful, your bigoted, and, since he wants to regenerate the coal industry, your masses struggling to breathe clean air.

After the speech, as Trump and Pence with their respective families stood awkwardly on the podium, music blared in the background. It was the Rolling Stones singing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Some viewers and commentators couldn’t help but wonder at the juxtaposition of the words against his laundry list of will-dos. 

But maybe Trump intended a deeper message. Since the last line of the chorus is, “But if you try sometime you find you get what you need,” perhaps this a veiled message that Trump’s platform is what the country needs at this time.  

2016 Election Will Test Voter Intelligence

Whither America? Whither the conscience and soul of America? 

A campaign based on negativity leavened with bombastic claims without details of how we are going to fix our problems and how we would pay for any fix, yet all will be terrific, has all but officially captured the nomination of a once proud and revered Republican Party. Voters in GOP primaries and caucuses, including many independents and disaffected Democrats, have latched onto the proverbial “pig in a poke.” 

Most reality shows last about four months. The danger this election cycle is that Americans, so used to viewing The Bachelor/Bachelorette or The Amazing Race, might think they are watching a season of Survivor or The Biggest Loser while the true reality is that the United States would be the biggest loser if Donald Trump ascends to the presidency. The founding principles of the country might not survive his term of office.

To many, Trump is a candidate to be scorned and derided, to be ridiculed, but mostly, to be feared, not because he is so unqualified and peripatetic in his views and opinions,  but rather because of what it says about the American public’s willingness to support someone who appeals not to their hopes and aspirations but to their prejudices, anger and resentments. 

Instead of a nation of laws and equal opportunity, we are descending into a nation that reviles any institution that differs with our individual views. The misogynists among us have been emboldened by Trump’s attacks on women. Those opposed to marriage between the races have blasted Old Navy’s use of a photo of an interracial family in an ad (http://nyti.ms/26UWLMQ). Religious extremists of varied faiths decry the Supreme Court decision permitting same-sex marriage. They believe the Bible supersedes the Constitution. Unless you are descended from Native Americans, you are the progeny of immigrants. Yet Trump has stoked xenophobia. Respect for our military suffered a blow when Trump demeaned Sen. John McCain and other prisoners of war for being captured. Trump has questioned long-standing alliances such as NATO and raised doubts about the supremacy of civilian control over the military (according to The New York Times, he would empower “military leaders over foreign affairs specialists in national security debates” (http://nyti.ms/23pBN3X).  

It is indisputable we have bifurcated into a nation of haves and have nots. Equally true is that the population has segmented into groups with no memory or historical context for the evil demagogues, both foreign and domestic, can perpetuate and those who recall or remember the history of the not too distant past. 

This campaign will test the intelligence of the electorate. It will pit against each other stark differences in tone and substance. Will the public vote to roll back decades of progress in equality and economic opportunity, environmental and product protection, American leadership in the world, or will we opt for barriers and repeal based on a demagogue’s populist rantings?

Sadly, our nation has a history of turning its back on the future. Jim Crow laws followed emancipation. Isolationism and anti-Semitism stoked by the likes of Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts followed victory in World War I. McCarthyism followed our ascendancy as the premiere power in the world after the second world war. 

The central question of the November election will be, which group of Americans will tip the balance—those who reject the last 80 years of American leadership, or those who continue to believe the United States can be an example for all nations?

Learning the Difference Between New Mexico and Arizona

If there is one thought you come away with after driving 1,100 miles across the southwest desert from Phoenix through Tucson, eastward to Alomogordo, NM, then northward to Santa Fe and Taos and back down to Albuquerque, as Gilda and I did last week, it is that pioneer men and women had grit uncommon to most humans. 

What took us just some 20 hours of driving in air-conditioned comfort over a week’s time probably took as much as 73 days in a covered wagon averaging 15 miles per day. If the pioneers arrived after late spring when temperatures hover for months between 85 and 106 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the location, you had to wonder what made any of them want to stay in this natural convection oven. Forget that hooey about it being “dry heat.” A furnace blast of hot, 100 degree air is hot, hot, hot.

Yes, there are points of breathtaking beauty. But even now, with air conditioning universally available in your home, your car, your place of business unless it is outdoors, the heat is oppressive. Weighty. Energy sapping. What could have tempted the early settlers who did not have the benefit of air conditioning? Surely the local Native Americans did not weave a welcome mat for them.

Time out. Let’s take a step back. Most of you, no doubt. have a Western European orientation. And by Western European I mean Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and North Sea and Baltic Sea countries. When I wrote “early settlers” you probably thought of Americans and immigrants of European heritage heading west in wagon trains. 

Yet the reality is the southwest was colonized by the Spanish almost a hundred years before the first successful English settlement in Jamestown,VA. In elementary school my teachers barely taught the history of western America. For us, the history of the American Frontier began with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and Lewis and Clark. But that same frontier was largely a Spanish and then Mexican territory until the United States captured it in the Mexican-American War of 1848.

We didn’t covet all that we took. Sure, California had gold. But Arizona and New Mexico had lots of Catholic, Spanish speaking residents. Our white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Congress had no desire to extend citizenship to that type of resident. The U.S. Congress denied New Mexico’s repeated applications to be admitted to the Union from 1850 until 1912 when New Mexico and Arizona finally matriculated from territory to statehood.

Given the current debate on immigration and the antipathy of many toward Hispanic newcomers, it is enlightening to note New Mexico’s and Arizona’s respective attitudes toward their Spanish-speaking residents as embodied in their state constitutions.

New Mexico includes two specific sections I’ll reproduce here:

“Text of Section 8: 

“Teachers to Learn English and Spanish 

“The legislature shall provide for the training of teachers in the normal schools or otherwise so that they may become proficient in both the English and Spanish languages, to qualify them to teach Spanish-speaking pupils and students in the public schools and educational institutions of the state, and shall provide proper means and methods to facilitate the teaching of the English language and other branches of learning to such pupils and students.”

“Text of Section 10: 

“Educational Rights of Children of Spanish Descent 

“Children of Spanish descent in the state of New Mexico shall never be denied the right and privilege of admission and attendance in the public schools or other public educational institutions of the state, and they shall never be classed in separate schools, but shall forever enjoy perfect equality with other children in all public schools and educational institutions of the state, and the legislature shall provide penalties for the violation of this section. This section shall never be amended except upon a vote of the people of this state, in an election at which at least three-fourths of the electors voting in the whole state and at least two-thirds of those voting in each county in the state shall vote for such amendment.” 

Arizona’s constitution is silent on both areas.

Can Evil Be Contained?

Can you stop a lone gunman? Can you stop a sole terrorist? After evil has been released, can you put it back into Pandora’s box?

Some people ask, how could anyone kill innocent children? The truth is, such depraved behavior should not surprise us. Brutality, senseless and premeditated, is universal. It’s been with us since Biblical times (read the story of Dinah and the slaughter her brothers wrought on the helpless, infirm males of Sechem—Genesis 34). Or Pharaoh’s dictate to slay the first born of the Hebrews. Think we’re more humane in our “enlightened” age? Not if you’re familiar with our treatment of Native Americans. Or Africans brought here into slavery. Or if you’ve followed the individual and collective torments afflicted by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and their legions, by Lon Pol, Slobodan Milošević, Yasser Arafat, by drug cartels, Muslim extremists, African warlords who, terrifyingly, arm children only slightly older than those killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School, to kill others. 

It’s not an exhaustive list, just an exhausting one as we contemplate how in the name of religion or nationalism or some –ism that is meaningless to most everyone else, carnage is condoned and, given technological advances, made more efficient with weaponry available to almost anyone, a “modern convenience” unimaginable just decades ago. 

Adam Lanza, by increasing accounts, was a troubled young man who should not have had access to guns, let alone the firepower his mother stored in their home. Adam was not able to conquer our most basic instinct to harm, to inflict superiority over another. Restrictive gun laws won’t prevent another tragedy, though the frequency of incidents might be diminished. They will happen. Too many guns already are out there. Too many unstable males (have you noticed these shootings are never perpetrated by females?) are not supervised and can easily get their hands on guns. It’s ironic that 17 years ago the State of Connecticut shut down a mental health facility, Fairfield Hills State Hospital, that might have housed Adam Lanza in the very community he has shaken to its core, Newtown. 

Israel has shown that while all terrorist action cannot be eradicated a pro-active approach to security can shield citizens from most danger in public places. Perhaps an answer for our school systems, at least for grades K-12, is to have single-entry facilities monitored by an armed guard. Yes, it would be costly (my guess is $50,000 per school building). But would it be more onerous than having to live through another massacre? Are we saying we are prepared to live by an actuary’s calculations that it’s more cost efficient to endure another mass murder than staff a security guard who most likely will never have to engage his protective skills?

The solution is not foolproof. Several times a week I walk into our local high school on my way to instruct students in the English as Second Language study hall. There’s a security desk outside the administrative offices. Once, maybe twice, I have been stopped by the guards. We’re just too trusting a society; 99.99% of the time, it makes no difference. But all it takes for disaster to strike is for the .01% to sneak through carrying a semi-automatic gun stocked with an oversized ammunition clip. 

The gun lobby believes armed deterrence is an answer. It believes all adults should carry weapons, even concealed guns, even on school grounds. I prefer letting trained professionals handle security. It should be a service we are all prepared to fund. 

Sugar Daddies, Trust in God, The Summer Camp Experience

Sugar Daddies: Or perhaps I should have titled this segment Sugar Babies. Either way, we’re dealing with the same phenomenon, albeit in different cultures.

Seems young women in America and China are turning to the oldest profession in the world after finding careers in modern walks of life not forthcoming. Recent articles portray college coeds and graduates as independent contractors plying the sex trade for profit.

In the case of U.S. practitioners (let’s not call them prostitutes for now), the thrust of this new-found interest is to find someone(s) to pay off their mounting college tuition bills (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/29/seeking-arrangement-college-students_n_913373.html).

In China, a land of increasingly stiff competition to supplant the U.S. as the world’s dominant economic power, young nubile women are status symbols sought by the wealthy and powerful, not all of whom are eligible bachelors. Indeed, having a mistress is the modern day version of keeping a concubine (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/world/asia/10mistress.html?ref=world).

It’s hard not to smile when reading these stories, though I must admit they portray rather discouraging states of the mores and fiscal conditions of the two largest economies in the world.


In God We Trust? Not so fast. Though our paper money extols trust in the Almighty, a survey by Public Policy Polling of North Carolina, a Democratic-leaning firm, found barely half of all Americans believe God is doing a good job.

As reported on Wednesday’s The Colbert Report, in response to the question, “If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of God’s performance,” just 52% of the 928 Americans polled in mid July answered in the affirmative. Nine percent disapproved, while 40% were “not sure” (those numbers add up to 101%, but don’t worry—some angel must have been sitting on the head of a poll taker’s pen causing the lapse in math).

Hard to say why God was having almost as much trouble as President Obama, whose approval ratings in another recent PPP survey hit just 46%. But Stephen Colbert had as logical a reason as any for God’s less than inspiring numbers: “The public is always tough on a prominent figure who had a child out of wedlock.”


Jewish Indians? I am familiar with Iroquois Indians. I am familiar with Camp Ramah, a chain of Jewish overnight and day camps throughout the United States, Canada and Israel. But I was caught off guard by a mini-bus scurrying around Yonkers the other day sporting the Camp Ramaquois name tag. Had I run across proof the 10 lost tribes of Israel had evolved into Native Americans? (That gag is one of the funnier bits of dialogue in the now classic western Cat Ballou.) Was Camp Ramaquois melding Jewish and Native American heritages?

Anyway, I googled Camp Ramaquois and found it to be a day camp in Pomona, NY. From everything I saw on the Web site, it appears to be a wonderful place to spend a summer. But it surely was not the type of summer camping experience I had. Nor did it reflect positively, in my mind, on the toughness of our youth to endure a summer in the great outdoors.

Now, Gilda would tell you the sleepaway camps I attended for 15 years were cushy. After all, their bunks had indoor plumbing and we barely ever hiked or camped out in the woods. She’d go positively bonkers if she knew the conveniences today’s campers enjoy at Ramaquois, as described by its Web site (italics added for emphasis):

* Over 50 fixed buildings, including air-conditioned facilities such as the gymnasium, movie theater, work shops, craft areas, computer lab and dining room;
* Spring-fed, natural five acre lake encompassing 2 "bongo" water trampolines, bumper boats, water bikes, paddle boards, inner tubes, "water-duckies", fountain sprays, kayaks and a professional team of lifeguards;
* 9 softball fields, 6 tennis courts, 3 basketball courts, 2 hockey rinks, 1 indoor and 3 grass volleyball courts, 3 soccer fields, 2 wiffle ball courts, 2 Bonzo Ball walls, 2 Ga-Ga courts and 6 pickle ball courts;
* 8 pools, all with a water temperature of 84 degrees;
* Air-conditioned health center with five registered nurses and an EMT;
* Separate Junior Camp facilities including air-conditioned bunks, climbing wall and challenge course and hockey rink:
* A state-of-the-art archery range;
* Athletics Pavilion and gymnastics equipment including pommel horses, uneven bars and a tumble track;
* Vertical reality climbing tower and element park;
* Zip line over Rama Lake;
* Nature science center, including a petting zoo and fishing dock;
* Water Works spray park.

I don’t know about you, but I totally want to go there! A/C in the bunks and dining room! 84 degrees in the pool! Sign me up. I might even learn to swim there!