PBS is running a 10-hour documentary mini-series, Carrier, about life aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.
Episode 3, Super Secrets, which aired Friday and is being released online today, includes interviews with gay and lesbian servicemembers. One of them, quartermaster third class petty officer Brian Downey who served in the navigation department of the Nimitz, was interviewed by Andy Towle:
How do you feel about the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy in general?
In this day and age and the way things are changing, if they drop it I don’t see that it would be a big deal for anybody. People know each other on the ship. And that’s just in the little community itself. If they were to drop the policy I’m sure it wouldn’t cause much of a security risk for anybody. It’s always been around — there have always been people in the military that have served that are gay. And people that have been in great positions — people that are in very high positions — and if it were dropped I’m sure it wouldn’t be a big deal. We’re not here to freak you out, we’re here to try to do something with you - we need to do our job and do it well. We just happen to be a little different — just like blacks were different, just like women were different. Well before those times there were gays in the military. I think it would be a very big social uplifting, an awakening for people.
Meanwhile, SLDN (Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a leading policy organization dedicated to ending discrimination against and harassment of military personnel affected by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”) is in the middle of a six city western tour to highlight efforts to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
Tonight there’s an SLDN reception on the Vegas Strip at the Gay & Lesbian Community Center of Southern Nevada at 6 p.m.
Bill Moyers did his best last night on PBS to put Barack Obama’s controversial pastor into perspective. He succeeded in showing the man’s brilliance but created unease in an observer who, by taste and temperament, is not attracted to apocalyptic preaching about the human condition.
From the interview, it’s easy to see what Obama found in Jeremiah Wright and his church that gave a new dimension to his secular desire to help the poor and dispossessed during his early days in Chicago.
Wright’s church apparently did and does good work in uplifting its community, but the social benefits come with a moral price–the preacher’s selective view of good and evil in the political world.
Consider Wright’s use of Martin Luther King to justify his own history. “Dr. King, of course, was vilified,” he told Moyers, asserting that, after King talked about racism, militarism and capitalism, he was “ostracized not only by the majority of Americans in the press; he got vilified by his own community. They thought he had overstepped his bounds…He was vilified by all of the Negro leaders who felt he’d overstepped his bounds talking about an unjust war.”
Martin Luther King’s opposition to the war made him unpopular with Lyndon Johnson but not the rest of America, least of all African-Americans and, unlike Wright, he did not use it to condemn all of American history, from the mistreatment of Native Americans to plotting drug addiction in black communities.
The Rev. Wright’s need to “damn” America leads him to a peculiar view of history. He goes back centuries to mine our national past for evil but, when asked about Louis Farrakhan’s racist and anti-Semitic speech, dismisses it with “That was twenty years ago” and praises him for getting African-Americans off drugs and giving them self-respect.
Perhaps most troubling of all is his smiling intimation that Barack Obama is only distancing himself from his views for political expedience: “(W)hat happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician. But he did not disown me because I’m a pastor.”
I watched the one hour Bill Moyers interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and came away impressed with the Reverend and disappointed that he has been so abused by the media.
To me, in context, the Reverend is passionate, articulate, reasonable and accurate. His comment about “God Dam America” makes sense to me as a condemnation of the selfish and vicious policies of our country that were often justified as with God’s blessing. He was expressing the startling conflict between the promise of America and our actions, and what God might conclude. In his comment that “the chickens came home to roost” on September 11, he said he was actually quoting a former US Ambassador. And the point he was making is that our nation has a history of perpetrating violence on on innocent bystanders who were in the way of America manifesting its destiny.
I am disappointed that Senator Obama felt he had to distance himself from this man to accommodate pervasive small mindedness.
It seems to me that every one of us can have something we said, or did, taken out of context and distorted in a way to make it into something it is not. I have owned a service business for over 25 years. Almost 20 years ago I stopped hugging my staff because one of them filed a legal complaint that my hugging others made her feel uncomfortable and sexually threatened. I was not prepared to spend thousands of dollars to somehow prove that my behavior was not abusive.
It is the nature of media to take items out of context in order to inflame a conflict. But that is handicapping our societies opportunities to progress towards mature discussion of issues.
It is the nature of amoral political operatives who believe that the ends justify the means just to get their candidate or party elected.
And it is the failure of good people to allow themselves to make conclusions based on the flimsiest of information.
I can only hope that the internet and bloggers can be a force to keep expanding responsible public dialog. And that political reforms can be made to create a level playing field for the truth.
What emerges from watching the endless YouTubing of Jeremiah Wright is not the picture of a religious or political fanatic but a world-class attention-seeker. In those operatic video clips, there is a dashiki-dressed performer playing to the crowd, a soulmate, not of Louis Farrakhan, but of Bill Maher, whose imprudent comments on 9/11 cost him his network gig.
Now Obama’s pastor is back on stage, coming out of his recent retirement, with Bill Moyers on PBS tonight and at the National Press Club in Washington next Monday, flamboyantly defending himself to the possible political detriment of his former congregant:
“I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?”
If Hillary Clinton’s campaign were paying him, the Rev. Wright couldn’t being doing more for them than to keep Obama’s embarrassment front and center in the days leading up to the final critical primaries.
But we may be underestimating him. By continuing to call attention to himself, Wright may be deviously trying to show that Obama is not under the Svengali-like influence of a dangerous man, just bedeviled by the antics of a showoff.
If so, that would be too subtle for most voters. All that may register with them is Obama’s unfortunate choice in a spiritual adviser.
In 1969, over Memorial Day, Life Magazine devoted an issue to pictures of 242 American soldiers who had died in Vietnam in a recent week. While the nation, the editors said, was being “numbed” by a “statistic which is translated to direct anguish in hundreds of homes all over the country, we must pause to look into the faces. More than we must know how many, we must know who.”
It made the country stop and think. This Memorial Day, the best way to honor the dead of all America’s wars would be to look at those who died in Iraq and see them as people, not statistics.
On a cable news network or PBS, at the rate of one every ten seconds, it would take more than 11 hours to bring their faces, names and home towns to the TV screens of American homes.
Crimes against humanity come large now–wars, holocausts, ethnic cleansing–but sometimes a small horror rises from the past and pierces the heart. Such is the case of a man convicted last week of grave robbing–harvesting and selling body parts, including those of the most civilized man I ever knew.
For several generations of Americans, Alistair Cooke was the Englishman who loved America, writing about life here for the Manchester Guardian, doing “Letter From America” radio broadcasts that were heard around the world and finally sitting in an armchair in front of Public TV cameras as the cultivated host of “Masterpiece Theater.”
It was kind of a jolt when CNN played “news alert” music and flashed news about the players implicated in the steroids controversy during the debate. Do you think the news channels that are carrying the steroids report live are breaking in with updates from the debate?
3:25 pm ET: Closing thoughts — Obama had the best line, bringing Clinton onto his team as an adviser. A “wow” moment that halted the laughter. Clinton seemed to get back into her groove for much of the afternoon — good, strong close for her. Edwards though wins on my scorecards — he was relentlessly on message, sounding strong, and making a very good case to keep this a three-person race.
Alan Keyes is demonstrating why he has not been a welcome participant on the debate stage this year. He bullies the moderator into calling on him and then growls out a long statement, after which no one applauds.
Alberto Gonzales, Monica Goodling and others of the Bush Brigade who worked so hard to subvert American freedoms are gone, but their mission is moving forward. After chipping away at our legal rights, next on the agenda is control of our minds through mass media.
A House Committee will turn the spotlight today on FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, who has been busy trying to concentrate ownership more than ever before into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and a few other corporate chieftains.
Like all loyal Bushies, Martin has not let legal niceties get in his way.
Citing “complaints from the public and professionals within the communications industry,” Rep. Bart Stupak, who heads the Energy and Commerce subcommittee that is investigating the FCC head, says, “It is one thing to be an aggressive leader, but many of the allegations indicate possible abuse of power and an attempt to intentionally keep fellow commissioners in the dark.”
Martin and other FCC members will testify about his efforts to bulldoze through the easing of rules limiting cross-ownership of newspapers and TV stations in the same city as well as “cooking the books” to push through regulations to crack down on cable TV which, outside of Fix News, has not been as servile as the Administration would like.
Would you rather see the candidates grilled by Tim Russert and Wolf Blitzer or a snowman and a gun nut cradling his “baby,” a semi-automatic weapon?
Close call, but isn’t there an alternative? The question is prompted by Paul Krugman’s column after last week’s Democratic debate, claiming Barack Obama was “a sucker” for signing on to fears that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” that will go bankrupt before Baby Boomers can collect what’s due them.
Most voters, it’s fair to say, would like to know who’s blowing smoke here–politicians or dueling economists–but we’re not likely to find out from sound-bite answers to ignorant questions.
In our treasured but messy democracy, there is room for college girls to ask Hillary Clinton about diamonds and pearls but so far not for informed political scientists, historians and economists to ask knowledgeable questions that could show us who really understands the issues.
At the end of this month, CNN will give us Republican hopefuls being discomfited by cutesy YouTubers, a spectacle that will undoubtedly produce entertaining insights into how well the candidates handle social embarrassment.
But if we want to know what they know about issues that will affect our lives when one of them takes the oath, couldn’t there be at least one debate in which they face those talking heads the networks trot out only on election night to give us perspective on what’s been going on or at other times we only hear on PBS?
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but total ignorance, as we know only too well from recent experience, can be disastrous. Along with the snowman and Chris Matthews, can’t we have at least one debate with questions from Krugman and his academic peers of various political persuasions?
We should be willing to take the risk of being bored to death to try to avoid being governed by morons.
While watching Bill Moyers last night I learned of Catalog Choice - a free service that lets you decline paper catalogs you no longer wish to receive. Reduce the amount of unsolicited mail in your mailbox, while helping to preserve the environment.
We’re in recurring nightmare territory here. A Zogby poll shows more than half of voters would support a military strike to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon and believe it likely the U.S. will do so before next year’s election.
On PBS’ News Hour, normally an oasis of rationality in the TV news desert, we have a solemn debate about attacking Iran between Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and Norman Podhoretz, the Neo-Con relic Rudy Giuliani is propping up to prove he is a true conservative.
When Zakaria points out we have used deterrence and containment against nuclear threats from China, the Soviet Union and North Korea, Podhoretz accuses him of “an irresponsible complacency…comparable to the denial in the early ’30s of the intentions of Hitler that led to what Churchill called an unnecessary war involving millions and millions of deaths that might have been averted if the West had acted early enough.”
If Zakaria’s informed rationality and Podhoretz’s apocalyptic drool are given equal weight as two sides of the argument, we may be headed for another Iraq, propelled by the same political and media cowardice of five years ago.
The Senate passes the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment designating the Iranian Revolution Guard as a terrorist organization by a vote of 76 to 22, with Hillary Clinton, among other Democrats, failing to see that the Bush-Cheney Administration will surely use it to justify an attack on Iran without seeking Congressional approval.
Such willful blindness now leads to apparent public approval of what would surely be another act of national insanity, putting American troops in harm’s way in three Muslim countries based on no compelling national interest beyond the loopy theories of a gaggle of armchair warriors in a discredited lame-duck Administration.
To top it all off, we have Rudy Giuliani war-mongering for votes in New Hampshire by accusing Clinton and Obama of wanting to negotiate with bad people and debating whether to invite Ahmadinejad and Osama to “the inauguration or the inaugural ball.”
Why aren’t more politicians and media people speaking out about this recurrence of madness?
October 6th, 2007 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
NOTE: The Moderate Voice runs guest voice posts from time to time. One of the most popular guest voices is Dan Schneider, who does guest reviews for us. TMV coblogger Shaun Mullen loved Ken Burns’ The War…but as you’ll see below, Dan Schneider had a different reaction and he tells you exactly why.
In regards to art, greatness is not merely a difference of scale, but a difference of kind, in that the elements that constitute greatness force an almost alchemical change in the nature of the beast. The brushstroke, wordly coinage, motion of the camera, or whatever it is that constitutes the given art, becomes more than the brushstroke, wordly coinage, or motion of the camera.
There seems to be an almost ineffable rise in the ability to invoke reaction from the art’s percipients, and while certainly not supernatural, the great art and the great artist is a cut above, even if the mechanism of the ascendancy is not immediately evident, even to the most astute critic.
This ideal was brought home to me while watching filmmaker Ken Burns’ most recent PBS documentary, The War, co-directed by Lynn Novick, for Burns, despite his ability to often stumble into a great moment, seems not to fundamentally understand the mechanics nor elements that constitute greatness. This 15 plus hour film follows in the wake of three other monumental documentaries he has crafted in the last decade and a half: the magnificent The Civil War- whose only dramatic flaw was the melodramatic schmaltz historian Shelby Foote displayed for the Confederacy, the too long Baseball, and the somnolent Jazz. In between he has crafted some interesting shorter documentaries on subjects as diverse as Mark Twain and Jack Johnson, but his bread and butter has been the marquee ‘big doc.’
Burns has been plagued by years of controversies, both artistically and historically. His best film, The Civil War, which pioneered the Burnsian template of talking heads, melodramatic readings of personal letters, and slow scans of still photographs, accompanied by sometimes highly poetic words (and often purple prose), and swelling crescendos of music, was a triumph of art in a journalistic form.
Yet, even that artistically great film was dogged by numerous historical flaws- documented in Robert Brent Toplin’s book Ken Burn’s The Civil War: Historians Respond. Baseball was far too long, and too obsessed with the cult of personality, rather than the thing that made the game America’s pastime: its history, season by season, and its pennant races. Jazz was a snooze that hagiographized often obscure musicians, and the whole project was a bit too weighted down with Political Correctness.
Now, with the release of his fourth epic, more cracks in the Burnsian aura have shown through. Yes, it is a significant uptick from the downward trajectory of the last two epics, but The War still falls short of The Civil War, and by a longshot. This is because Burns does not seem to understand that content must impact form. Given that the talking heads of this film are the percipients of that event, and not historians, one would think that he might have edited out some of the more banal segments, where the oldsters tend to babble on about minutia- important in their minds, but utterly irrelevant to the neutral observer.
Also, by using actor and celebrity World War Two enthusiast Tom Hanks to read the written observations of a small town journalist, Burns commits another great error of judgment- namely that most of what the editor, and the other quoted letters and commentaries say, are simply not as well wrought nor as emotionally engaging as those culled from the Civil War archives. Moral: not all small town newspaper types are budding Ambrose Bierces. Read the rest of this entry »
And so on the second day of the seventh month of the fifth year of the war in Iraq, the final episode of Ken Burns’ The War ran on PBS. This vivid mosaic of World War II at home and abroad was a big hit by public broadcasting standards, drawing the most viewers since an episode of Antiques Roadshow in 2000, although falling far short of prime-time heavy hitters like CSI and Desperate Housewives.
We probably have to take Burns at his word that The War was not intended as a counterpoint to the Iraq war, and indeed pre-production of the documentary did get underway well before the drive on Baghdad.
But in an era when the images and sounds that come through our ever larger TVs have an outsized ability to grab and hold our attention, The War is a powerful if apparently unintentional indictment of today’s war, and most notably the arrogance and folly of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the other members of the Neocon Poets Society.
Whether the men and women who fought and sacrificed in World War II were nobler than the men and women who fight and sacrifice today is not an issue, but the powerful message of “A World Without War,” the ironically titled final episode of Burns’ seven-part, 14½-hour documentary is unequivocal:
The GIs who landed on Omaha Beach in the D-Day invasion, who liberated Hitler’s death camps in Austria and Germany, who fought to victory on Okinawa as their foxholes filled with the guts of thousands of killed and suicided Japanese, knew exactly what their war was about.
They were constantly reminded of what their war was about by President Roosevelt, a great man whose great ego was matched by an ability to inspire Americans to make the enormous sacrifices necessary to defeat a fascist demon that threatened to devour the planet and destroy our most precious freedoms.
The GIs who are fighting in the streets of Baghdad and the desert wastes of Anbar have only the vaguest idea of what their war is about.
They are constantly if unintentionally reminded of the core disingenuousity of their war by President Bush, a small man who also has a great ego but cannot camouflage his failures of leadership behind flag waving and false analogies to FDR’s war as he prattles on about the demon of the hour – first Saddam Hussein, then the insurgency, then Al Qaeda and now Iran – and whose war threatens to devour the Middle East and policies at home undermine those precious freedoms.
Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15) gives all Americans the chance to gain insight into the nation’s largest minority.
You might as well give it a try. There are more than 44 million Hispanics in the United States, and the Census Bureau estimates that — by 2050 — we’ll represent one in four Americans.
And despite efforts by nativists to keep out both legal and illegal immigrants in a desperate attempt to turn back the demographic clock, Hispanics aren’t going anywhere. Why should we? In many cases, we were here first.
Here is a scene that won’t be part of Ken Burns’ new series about World War II on PBS this week.
In 1945, a 20-year-old foot soldier arrives at General Patton’s Third Army in France. Before being sent to a rifle company, he is assigned to stay up every night and on the battalion’s only typewriter, which is not available during the day, copy officers’ notes about suspected SIWs, Self-Inflicted Wounds.
Night after night, under a Coleman lantern hissing yellow light with sounds of battle in the background, he taps out stories in quadruplicate about young men who have maimed themselves out of fear and fatigue, offering up some body part to save the rest — shooting an arm or leg, slashing a thigh, dislocating a shoulder or wrenching a knee in some improbable fall.
Fighting a war, the stories reveal, is like everything else that is important in life, a matter of showing up, doing what has to be done and not running away, and there is a thin line between those who can do it and those who can’t.
Later on and further away, there will be talk of heroes and greatest generations and abstractions about defending ideals. For those who fight wars, it’s as simple as being there and staying.
The more complicated questions have to be answered by those who send and keep them there.
September 25th, 2007 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
The n.s. has hit the fan in the Republican Party.
“N.S.” stands for no shows, the GOP’s top, leading candidates who insisted they just could not squeeze in the time to participate in a debate focusing on minority issues. Of course, it’s merely a coincidence that it just happened that none of the four big front-runners showed up.
And former Rep. J.C. Watts, a charismatic African-American whom Republican Party bigwigs pointed to for years as proof that the Republican tent was a big tent and not really a pup tent, minced no words — in words that seem both blunt and a bad omen for the Republican Party in the long run:
A former member of the House Republican congressional leadership — and the last African-American to serve as a member of the GOP in Congress — harshly criticized Tuesday the decision of the Republican presidential front-runners to not attend a debate focused on minority issues.
“I think the best that comes out of stupid decisions like this,” said former Oklahoma Rep. J.C. Watts, is “that African-Americans might say, ‘Was it because of my skin color?’ Now, maybe it wasn’t, but African-Americans do say, ‘It crossed my mind.’”
Watts is basically saying what many Americans and pundits — and Republicans — have said: the the decision to snub en masse a forum where key Republicans could have shown that they are not virtually writing-off minority voters is seemingly beyond belief for a party that seems to be on the political ropes. And coming from Watts, who is highly respected by the media and one of the most visible “talking heads” on television and cable shows, there is likely to be long term damage to the perception of the Republican Party among minority voters.
But it is NOT just Watts who has blasted the front-runners’ move that seems indicative of candidates who may not be front runners in a general election: Read the rest of this entry »
September 24th, 2007 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
“There’s no such thing as a good war, only necessary wars and just wars,” says former Marine Corps torpedo bomber pilot Sam Hynes in the opening minutes of The War, the magisterial Ken Burns documentary that premiered on most PBS stations last night and continues in seven parts and some 14½ hours in all through early next month.
In fact, the first episode is called “A Necessary War” and would seem to be a backhanded reference to Iraq. But Hynes was speaking of Japanese atrocities in the Pacific and Burns says the interview was shot before the 2003 invasion and toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime.
Therein lies a central lesson of Burns’ latest mega-documentary, which while not his best is probably the most nuanced treatment of a war that has been written, talked and filmed about endlessly in this era of countless History Channel programs, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, a time when World War II veterans are dying at the rate of more than 1,000 a day.
As Burns puts it in debunking the notion that The War was produced because of Iraq, let alone Vietnam:
“When people complain in later episodes about not getting the right equipment — which is endemic to all wars — or generals making the wrong decisions, or politicians thinking about the upcoming elections, these are universal realities of war that just happen to be there accidentally. But we’re not unmindful that they will engage people with questions about the current situation. That’s the only reason why you do history. You’re not going to change what happened on June 6, 1944, but you’re going to ask questions that are going to help us on Sept. 11, 2007.”
The War contains substantial never-before-seen footage, some of it supressed by the U.S. government at the time, and I sometimes had to remind myself that this was not Hollywood special-effects wizardry, but the real thing. Yet although some of the clips are shockingly graphic and the blood flows in torrents, there is a familiarity to The War because the seminal events are so familiar, as is Burns’ narrator voice-over, talking-heads technique pioneered in The Civil War, his groundbreaking 1990 documentary and masterpiece.
Burns uses four American towns – Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; Luverne, Minnesota; and Sacramento, California – to frame The War, moving back and forth between homefront and front-line experiences, and it is the moving testimony of the men who made it back home that will stay with you.
Quentine Aanenson, a pilot from Laverne, wrote to his sweetheart:
“I live in a world of death.”
Hynes on being a bored young man in a small town one day and in combat the next:
“And then suddenly you could be a pilot or a submariner or an artilleryman or any damn thing, but it was something exciting and it was something adult. It has nothing to do with patriotism. It has nothing to do, really, with who the enemy is. It’s the opportunity to be somebody more exciting than the kid you are.”
Ray Leopold of Waterbury of the day his unit liberated a Nazi concentration camp:
“I think the horror is still with me. I think there’s no apology that can ever atone for what I saw.”
Senator and former infantryman Daniel Inouye on shooting a German:
“You would think that at that moment, after killing a human being, you would feel a little remorseful. I felt pleasure. And the men applauded. ‘You were terrific, Dan.’ “
Burns and co-director Lynn Novick return frequently to the irony that while the U.S. was battling fascism abroad it was upholding racial injustice at home. Although this is a major theme in The War, Burns caught heat from Hispanics and Native Americans that their contributions had been ignored and added substantial footage about them in mini-documentaries that PBS stations are showing in conjunction with the main event.
While it is damning with faint praise, it may be the familiarity of the Burns format that is The War’s only real detraction. The documentary is, in a sense, a prisoner of its format, which can occasionally have a kind of numbing predictability since we all know who the winners and losers were.
No matter. In the end, The War is a huge achievement and a rare television event – something that families can and should watch together. I hope that you and your loved ones, especially school-age kids who can be prepared for the graphic scenes and occasional obscenity, are able to do so.
And while Ken Burns has taken pains to explain in interviews that The War was not produced with Iraq in mind, comparisons are unavoidable.
While not diminishing the valor of the men and women fighting in Iraq, it makes George Bush even smaller and more petty for a folly that could not be more different than World War II, which make his mangled historical comparisons between the two so obscene.
Episode 2, “When Things Get Tough,” airs at tonight; Episode 3, “A Deadly Calling,” tomorrow night; Episode 4, “Pride of Our Nation,” Wednesday night; Episode 5, “FUBAR,” on September 30; Episode 6, “The Ghost Front,” on October 1; and Episode 7, “A World Without War,” on October 2.
The oil used to distill water, make plastic containers and ship them over long distances rivals the energy spent and the pollution caused by gas-guzzling cars.
Americans have to drive to work, take the kids to school and go shopping. They don’t have to drink water out of bottles.
In most places in the U.S., the habit is as necessary for health as strapping on an oxygen tank and breathing your own private air–and just about as cost-effective.
San Francisco, PBS reports, is banning the use of city money for bottled water. It started when an aide brought the Mayor his bottle of Fiji water with a big bag of oil surrounding it, and said, “Here’s what you’re actually consuming”–to produce the bottle and the distribution costs to get it to the United States.
Americans spend almost $100 billion a year for water no better than most tap water and sometimes no different. If they worry about safety, portable home filters can reassure them for pennies a gallon and reusable glass containers can make it as portable as and safer than plastic, which may leach into its contents.
As a still-breathing consumer of tap water for more than eight decades, I’ll drink to that.
