Today one of my students, who is from China, told me that he discovered my blog yesterday. He asked if I was worried that putting my opinions right out in public might get me in trouble.<\/p>\n
I responded that on the contrary, I see it as my responsibility as a citizen of the United States to do my part to stand up for our democracy, and to fight autocratic political shifts which threaten that democracy. Then I told him an old joke from Ronald Reagan:<\/p>\n
“Two men, an American and a Russian, were arguing. The American said, “in my country I can go to the White House, walk to the president’s office and pound the desk and say ‘Mr president! I don’t like how you’re running things in this country!'” The Russian said “I can do that too!”<\/p>\n
“Really?”<\/p>\n
“Yes! I can go to the Kremlin, walk into the general secretary’s office and pound the desk and say, Mr. Secretary, I don’t like how Reagan is running his country!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Somehow I don’t think our current president would get that joke. An that’s why I need to keep speaking up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today one of my students, who is from China, told me that he discovered my blog yesterday. He asked if I was worried that putting my opinions right out in public might get me in trouble. I responded that on the contrary, I see it as my responsibility as a citizen of the United States … Continue reading “An old joke”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27906"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27906"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27908,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27906\/revisions\/27908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}