Cagle World

I’m pretty sure that the number of people who are mourning the death of OJ Simpson can fit into the trunk of the smallest car Hertz ever rented.

He was a man who killed his wife Nicole, as well as innocent stranger Ron Goldman, and was acquitted because he played the race card.

As a human being, I am repulsed by the fact that he treated women like a punching bag. As a lawyer, I am repulsed by the fact that he did the same with our legal system.

But perhaps his death can serve a purpose. It will be a chance for us to focus on domestic violence, the generational abuse that ends in death and the destruction of families in every corner of the world.

The incidence of domestic violence is extremely high in many countries in South and Central America, in Africa, in the Middle East and South Asia.

If you were to shadow me in immigration court, you would see women from Egypt who have been tortured by their ex-police-officer husbands, women from El Salvador who were raped by their uncles, women from Mali who were beaten by their fathers as punishment for not marrying the men chosen for them, and women from Pakistan who were shot at by the Taliban for going to school.

They also happen in California, on the steps of a mansion owned by the rich and beautiful wife of an iconic athlete.

Domestic violence has no language, no citizenship, no age, no profession, no sexual orientation, no religion and in some cases, no gender requirements.

It is the one crime that for years went unreported in the United States for this simple reason: It was not a crime.

When I was growing up, men could rape their wives and the marital contract shielded them from criminal prosecution. That’s changed, thank God, but it’s still very hard to get any kind of protection from the authorities when the person beating your face into a facsimile of raw meat is the person who owns the house you live in.

One of the reasons I was disgusted with the OJ verdict was the reaction from some people who both tried to put the victim, Nicole Simpson, on trial. There was that sense that she had options they didn’t, that she could have run away, that money was her safe haven. Unfortunately, money cannot protect anyone from a person who wants you dead.

It also reminds me of the men I represented who were themselves victims of domestic violence either at the hands of their wives or their male partners. People refused to believe they were “real” victims. Imagine the pain of being told that your ordeal is fabricated, or it was your fault.

And then there was the race card.

If Nicole had been a Black woman, it’s still possible that OJ would have been acquitted.

I choose to think, though, the phenomenon of jury nullification wouldn’t have worked, because the subliminal message in the OJ acquittal was “we are protecting a Black man who probably committed the crime to serve justice to all the other Black men who were wrongly punished because of white women’s lies.”

While it is understandable  there would be anger about the Scottosboro Boys and the Emmet Tills, and all of the others whose names are lost to history, this should never come at the expense of a murdered woman.

People might deny this was what happened. People might say that the late Johnny Cochran just did what great lawyers do: argue zealously for the rights of their clients.

The guiltier they are, the more zealously you fight. People might also say that OJ still paid a steep price in terms of complete ostracization, and the loss of most of his earthly wealth. And those of us who believe in karma can take comfort in the fact that at the end, he suffered.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Nicole Simpson has been dead for three decades, that her son and daughter have been without a mother for 30 years, that the Goldman family lost a beloved son because of misdirected, homicidal rage, and that a murderer in all but the sentence was able to spend those last three decades of his life in relative freedom.

Hopefully, his death will bring some solace to the extended network of his victims. And hopefully it will also remind us of the horrific scourge of domestic violence that still exists, along with the repellent attempts to racialize human tragedy.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Gloria Steinem turned 90 years old last month. She is the oldest living feminist from an era when this was a sign of being a “serious woman.”

The thinking goes that unless you call yourself a feminist, people will send you back to the kitchen, forcibly impregnate you and hide your shoes. But that “I am woman, hear me roar” anthem singing is long past its heyday.

Gloria, however, is not. She has tried to remain relevant over the years by popping up and giving her opinion on various current events, like when Donald Trump was elected.

The day after the inauguration, she showed up at the Pink Hat Jamboree saying things like: “We are here and around the world for a deep democracy that says we will not be quiet, we will not be controlled, we will work for a world in which all countries are connected. God may be in the details, but the goddess is in connections. We are at one with each other, we are looking at each other, not up. No more asking daddy.”

I was told that I stand on her shoulders, and should be grateful for the fact that she allowed me to practice law, write a syndicated column, open my own bank account, study abroad, and cut my meat into little pieces all by myself.

So I thought, OK, if this lady is so exceptional, I need to read more of what she’s said because that Pink Hat speech wasn’t all that impressive.

So I bought a commemorative book of her quotations, in order to absorb the genius that is Gloria. After all, she made my life possible, so I want to be able to reference her in my conversations with other people.

Here’s one quote that impressed me, given the fact that the iconic feminist is a huge booster of abortion rights: “Your daughters are watching you.”

My first reaction was: not if you’ve already aborted them, Gloria. My second reaction is unprintable.

Another quote, this one from a collection entitled “The Truth Will Set You Free But First It Will Piss You Off” was particularly compelling because of its absolute irony: “For women, the only alternative to being a feminist is being a masochist.”

The irony comes in the fact that feminism has actually destroyed the lives of so many women who were otherwise content to focus on one of the most important jobs of all: giving life, raising families, being the “goddess” of their own homes and beloved of their husbands. Note that I say “one of” the most important jobs.

There are many women who have never married, never had children and who chose to work outside of the home. Those choices are legitimate.

The problem came in the feminists’ assertion that staying home had no value, or that the value actually needed to be monetized in this market economy. The ability to bear a child was considered just another option, a hobby, an attribute of womanhood and not the greatest biological and spiritual gift that we have.

Another quote that I found particularly interesting was this: “If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?”

The brilliance in this lies in its simplicity, and absolute narcissism, which has often been a hallmark of second-wave feminism. Gloria is basically saying that if you don’t like the way that the world is structured, you should change it to fit your particular needs.

There is no sense that perhaps your needs aren’t that important, or that if they are, someone else’s needs might take precedence. There is this single-minded, and simple-minded idea that whatever Lola wants, Lola gets, regardless of the consequences.

I also think that this was an early portent of the trans movement, as in, if the gender doesn’t fit, let us change the pronouns. But I digress.

There are also her series of comments about men: “The surest way to be alone is to get married”, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” and my favorite “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

This is Steinem’s core belief: men are toxic.

This is also the principle that undergirds her type of feminism. Any man who calls himself a feminist is a man who looks in the mirror and cries.

I’d say that any man who calls himself a feminist is a man who deserves a woman like Gloria.

Steinem is an icon.

But I have realized that it’s not because she’s particularly clever.

It’s because anyone who can write this sort of stuff for this long without being laughed out of the room is pretty darn amazing.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I was born in Baltimore at the end of 1961.

I was only in Charm City for the first months of my life, and was younger than a toddler when my mom and dad traveled back home to their native Philadelphia.

Both of them were down there on borrowed time: My father was finishing up his last year at the University of Maryland, College Park, and my mother found a job as a bank teller.

I remember my mother telling me on more than one occasion that she sometimes wished they could have stayed in Baltimore. She loved the city, used to take walks near the harbor which, to be honest, was not the grand and glorious inner harbor of the present day. Baltimore, like Philly, was a lived-in city with neighborhoods, people who had accents, strangers who smiled and the best seafood in the world.

It was a smaller cousin of her hometown, and she felt as if she could start over there. But they came home, and my first words were pronounced in a Philadelphia accent.

I wanted “wooder” in my sippy cup. And yet, for some strange reason, I have always had a profound love for my birth city.

If you asked me questions about its history, I could probably dig up a few tidbits about how Francis Scott Key wrote the national anthem, and that Nancy D’Alessandro went on to be the first female Speaker of the House, and Old Bay Seasoning goes with everything, including peanut butter sandwiches. Don’t ask, it’s an acquired taste.

But it’s not the accumulation of trivia that fuels my love of Baltimore.

It is this sense that even if you are uprooted at a young age, something of the place where you were born remains embedded in your heart. It’s probably the fact that the air that first fills your lungs as you yelp and scream on that delivery table marks you forever.

Even though I have spent more than 60 years in Philadelphia, and even though my conscious memories — glorious and tragic — are all centered in neighborhoods like Logan and 49th Street and South Philly and a smattering of places in the ‘burbs, there is something very Baltimore in me that hasn’t died.

It burbles up from that unexpected deep-down place when I drive by the Inner Harbor and see the Domino sign, still majestic and presiding over the Chesapeake. It pops up when I see a black-and-white video of the Colts, narrated by Philly legend John Facenda.

And just when I feel like a little bit of a fraud, appropriating memories and events that aren’t my own, the Key Bridge is gutted, and I feel my own gut punch. When I saw the film of the iconic bridge crumbling into the Patapasco, it felt as if a friend I hadn’t seen in many years was involved in a horrific car accident and I heard about her death on social
media.

Someone who worked at immigration for many years and who had always been kind to me was killed when her car collided with one that had sped through a stop sign. I hadn’t seen her in years, she had retired and moved away, but the announcement of her death elicited a physical reaction.

The Key Bridge was not a person. Iron girders and arches don’t feel pain. Crumbling extensions don’t shed blood.

But that is clearly not the point. When something becomes a part of you, whether it be human or inanimate, it takes on a dimension that defies easy measurement.

I cannot presume to understand the grief of Baltimoreans who traveled that bridge every day, going from home to work and back again, taking children to visit relatives or on vacations, fishing under it, or simply gazing at it framed against autumn sunsets.

But I can imagine how I would feel if the steps to the Philadelphia Art Museum were destroyed by some cataclysmic bomb blast, or William Penn’s Statue tumbled from its pedestal, or the river drives were destroyed in catastrophic flooding, or the fountains in Logan Square were removed from sight, or the Liberty Bell were shattered by some
vandal’s hammer.

I remember how I felt when Notre Dame was swallowed by flames a few years ago, and it was as if I had lost a family member.

I am certain that Baltimore is feeling that now.

So here, from a distance, I send my thoughts and my prayers for a city and a group of people who were my first companions.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

The other night, I took a friend out for her birthday at an upscale French restaurant.

The food is magnificent, as authentic as anything I tasted when I lived in Paris — cue the accordion music. But even perfection has its tics.

Normally, service at this restaurant is sublime. But this night, I had a problem. After having a wonderful meal and then calculating a respectable tip of 20% on a pretty expensive bill, since the service was OK but not exceptional, I gave the waiter the money.

He disappeared.

Later on, while I was finishing my coffee, I noticed him glaring at me as he was flitting around the tables nearby.

Normally, I leave a tip between 30-40% because I used to work in a fast food joint and know that it isn’t exactly easy work.

However, I am also aware that nobody is owed a tip, and that it’s not my fault if the employer isn’t paying a decent salary. Just because I want to enjoy a nice salad doesn’t mean I am required to adopt the guy who brings it to my table.

So the glaring, and then the lack of a “thank you” for the tip was a little unnerving.

Then I did what I normally do whenever I have an experience that can fit into into a couple of short sentences: I hopped on Twitter.

Surprisingly, my complaint got a lot of “likes,” which goes to show you I’m not the only one who has had to deal with an ungrateful little whippersnapper. Of course, there were a bunch of current or former waitstaff who weighed in, calling me entitled, saying 20% was a pittance.

As I said before, I often tip up to 50% of the meal if the person serving it to me shows that they really appreciated my presence, albeit temporary, in their lives.

If they made me feel as if it wasn’t a burden to serve me and their name was not Job, it’s my default position to show gratitude with extra cash.

But the suggestion that a tip is owed, not earned, and the refusal to extend a simple “thank you” is a troubling commentary on something that has more to do with character than carbohydrates.

I’m tired of people assuming they have rights and privileges regardless of their own conduct. It’s not like I want a stranger to write me into her will if I hold the door open or let him go ahead of me in line.

Those are the normal reflexes of people who live in a civilized society.

I’m talking about the idea that if you extend yourself beyond what is expected in a particular social situation, that should be rewarded by the most valuable and least expensive of things: a smile and acknowledgment.

Waiters and waitresses have a hard job, but so do police officers, doctors, construction workers and even immigration lawyers. The last time I checked, no one was leaving money in a tip jar for me.

The assumption that even the most mediocre service deserves some kind of financial premium is wrong.

Sorry, but all of those kids who were raised by mommy and daddy to believe that they were special have morphed into presumptuous ingrates. That bread basket you just put on my table is not going to cure cancer.

That being said, I am still going to tip in a grandiose and generous manner when the person who is on the other side of the money acknowledges my humanity. There are a lot of young people who make my lattes, mix my Aperol spritzes and slice my pizza into exactly the correct size of slice who deserve not only a tip, but my genuine gratitude
for their genuine kindness.

As for those who think I owe them, this Karen — or Mademoiselle Carine, as the case may be — has better use for her hard-earned dough.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

A few years ago, a bunch of people tried to erase the memory of Christopher Columbus.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. What they really wanted to do was to defame him and turn him into a caricature of a genocidal colonialist, completely manipulating the historical facts to fit their post-“George Floyd” sensitivities.

I remember standing in the middle of Marconi Plaza in Philadelphia, standing in front of the Columbus statue along with other like-minded Italian Americans, all of us gathered to prevent the then-mayor’s attempts to remove the one-and-a-half centuries-old statue from its place of honor.

I also remember seeing some self-defined Italian Americans marching along with their Antifa allies, saying things like “not in my name” and “Columbus shames Italians.” It was a bit of a gut punch to see people who allegedly shared my proud heritage walking arm-in-arm with those who were slandering one of our great heroes.

This was, I thought, nothing more than masochism and self-hatred.

I had that same feeling last week watching the Oscars. When Jonathan Glazer got up to accept his well-deserved Oscar for Best Foreign Film, “Zone of Interest,” I had flashbacks to those moments in Marconi Plaza.

Here was a Jewish man literally saying that he refuted his Jewishness, his ethnicity, his religion and his heritage because he believed that Israel was perpetrating a “genocide” in Gaza.

This was all the more shocking because the film that was just honored was a deeply moving story about the banality of evil, about a family of Nazis trying to live normal lives in the shadow of a concentration camp.

I have not yet seen the film, and despite Glazer’s comments, I intend to. We must remember genocide.

The poignant plea “never again” has gone unheeded, because antisemitism proliferates in this country and all over the world. The least that we can do is reflect and take note.

That’s why Glazer’s comments were so jarring.

Christopher Columbus is intimately tied to the Italian immigrant identity.

He was raised up as a symbol of strength and dignity, resilience and cultural significance in response to the mass lynching of Italian immigrants in New Orleans over a hundred years ago.

He may not be the perfect example of Italian excellence — I’m partial to Da Vinci to be honest — but he is definitely on the shortlist.

The Holocaust is different. While it is also uniquely tied to the Jewish experience and the most painful and compelling example of suffering in the diaspora, it belongs to all of us as well.

The measure of your humanity is defined by how you see the Holocaust.

If you deny it happened, like the famous writer David Irving, or if you minimize its importance, like the racist Louis Farrakhan, or if you simply wish people would stop talking about it, you are not a good person.

You are, to me, unworthy of respect.

Only those who view the Holocaust as a thing to which nothing else can be compared, no other assault on human rights, no matter how horrific it might have been, are people who share my worldview.

Decades of practicing asylum law have exposed me to the absolute worst of the human condition. There have been and continue to be killing fields all over the world. But the scope and the aftermath of what is known as the Shoah stands alone in time, space and significance.

And that is why I feel authorized to condemn Jonathan Glazer for daring to call what is happening in Gaza a holocaust, even with the small “h.”

Israel is not the Third Reich, intent on erasing an entire civilization simply because of its members’ innate identity.

Israel did not start bombing Gaza in a vacuum. Oct. 7 happened, just as Dec. 7 happened, just as Sept. 11 happened.

You cannot separate the carnage in Gaza from the carnage against innocent men, women and children living peacefully on kibbutzes.

Loss of life is always tragic, but some tragedies are worse than others. I have no problem deciding who deserves the lion’s share of my tears.

As a Catholic woman, I am surprised that a Jewish man who just made a sublime film about the massacre of his ancestors is incapable of seeing the difference in tragedies, the need to dispense with moral absolutes about the inhumanity of war, and the obligation to guarantee the safe return of Israeli hostages before even one gun is silenced.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

In 1978, I took the first of four driving exams. I failed them all.

I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that you cannot convince a Pa. State Police trooper that a three point turn involves eight backups.

Eventually, 30 years later, I took the test once more and passed.

Then, I put my license in my wallet and never drove again. It was basically a matter of pride. I had no intention of ever actually getting out on the road.

Which is why I ride SEPTA, Philadelphia’s public transit system. There are few people in the city who know the routes as well as I do: the Market Frankford El, the Broad Street Subway, bus lines from 2 through the 123 and every single regional rail schedule.

I have given so much money to public transit in Southeastern Pennsylvania that I am fully expecting a station to be named after me when I die.

And speaking of death, I’m hoping it doesn’t come while riding public transit. Over the past week, three people died and many more were injured in shooting incidents on
SEPTA.

People are killed every day in Philadelphia. Guns, some illegally acquired and some that are perfectly legitimate, are usually in the mix. You do have the random stabbing and even on public transit there is that crazy person pushing innocent commuters into the paths of trains, but the vast majority of the casualties can be connected to guns.

After the last shooting death, I posted this while sitting on a bus:

“Going home on Septa. No other option. 4 shootings, 3 deaths, many injured in the first 4 days of this week. We are under assault. Philly Mayor, this is not Fallujah. DA. Larry Krasner, shove your pathetic social justice concerns. Gun enthusiasts, effing compromise. We’re dying.”

Then, to up the ante, I thanked New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for instituting a bag search on public transit, to be conducted by National Guard.

I anticipated people who love Philadelphia’s progressive district attorney, who has a pattern and practice of not charging serious gun offenses, would respond with attacks on my looks and my age, which is how they usually roll on social media.

I anticipated that people who want to downplay the incidence of violence in the city would say that I’m misrepresenting the facts and that homicides are actually down by 20% since the previous year, which won’t impress the families of the 410 people murdered in 2023.

What I did not anticipate, but should have, were the number of people telling me to get a gun.

What I did not anticipate, but should have, were the number of people telling me that they were unwilling to have their “rights” violated because of criminals.

While there is indeed a right to own and use a gun, particularly to defend yourself, that right is not absolute. Don’t take it from me, take it from that noted Antifa activist, Antonin Scalia.

In the Heller decision, which found that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to bear arms, Scalia also wrote this: “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. [It is] not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

And as far as those bag searches are concerned, I have long believed that the Fourth Amendment has been bastardized and manipulated by people who don’t want us to know that they are committing crimes.

It has also been extended to allow women to kill their unborn children under a so-called “right to privacy,” which thankfully was dispensed with in 2022 by the overturning of Roe.

If we have no problem getting our bags searched by the TSA or at sporting events, we shouldn’t have a problem getting searched while boarding a bus where someone might shoot us dead.

Like so many people who either will not or cannot drive, I am forced to use public transportation. I should not be told that the only way to guarantee my safety is to pack a Smith and Wesson. And your right to privacy ends where my right to make it out of the subway alive begins.

These tools, as well as electing a district attorney who actually understands the law and prefers law-abiding citizens to criminals, will go a long way to protecting those of us who failed our driver’s tests three times in a row.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

When Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro engaged in a legal battle with the Little Sisters of the Poor over their refusal to subsidize birth control for their employees, I got very angry.

As a Catholic who takes her faith very seriously and an asylum lawyer who knows a little something about religious persecution, it seemed to me that the then-attorney general was violating the rights of some women who just wanted to be left alone to serve God’s glory.

Of course, there are those who will disagree and believe that Shapiro was fighting to preserve the civil rights of those female employees who, for whatever reason, refused to buy their own birth control, but it’s clear that going after nuns is not a good look.

I thought I’d seen the last of that kind of chicanery from a state official, but last week brought another example of what I truly believe is anti-Catholic bigotry.

The irony is that this time it’s a Republican attorney general from Texas acting under orders from a Republican governor from Texas.

Bigotry and illegality are, apparently, bipartisan.

We all know that Greg Abbott is waging his own war against the tide of illegal immigration that is making life unlivable at the southern border. He’s tried to use constitutional arguments to support his claim that he can interfere with the federal jurisdiction over immigration.

As a lawyer, I have to give him credit for his ingenuity. Also, as a lawyer, I have to say he’s completely off base on that one.

And now there’s something else he’s wrong about. On Feb. 20, Attorney General Ken Paxton, the one they couldn’t impeach, has decided to go after Annunciation House, a private organization that acts as a halfway house and temporary shelter for people who have crossed the border.

It was founded in 1978 by a few young Catholics in the El Paso Diocese who, ironically enough, wanted to help what was then called INS to deal with the human crisis at the border.

Back then it wasn’t as serious as it is today and involved mostly single Mexican men instead of entire families from Central and South America, but there was a need to provide some humanitarian aid to the surge of human cargo.

But Paxton has decided to redefine these unpaid workers as human smugglers.

According to Paxton, “Annunciation House knows that at least some of the aliens it provides services to are present illegally and are trying to avoid Border Patrol … Annunciation House’s transportation of those aliens presents a very significant likelihood of human smuggling.”

It’s a bit disingenuous for Paxton to accuse this shelter of human smuggling. While the Texas law that prohibits human smuggling does include acts involving the transportation of undocumented aliens across the border and within the state itself, he would then have to charge his own governor with human smuggling in order to be consistent with the word of the law.

Remember when Abbott was buying bus tickets to send aliens to Northeastern cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia? Under the letter of the law, that is also human smuggling.

What Annunciation House is doing is not illegal. It’s Catholic and Christian. It provides temporary shelter, food, clothing and medical care to people who are in need of it.

I am actually more offended by this attack on Annunciation House after having visited a similar facility outside of McAllen, Texas, last year. I spent an afternoon reading books to little girls from Venezuela, Brazil and Colombia, braiding their hair, and drawing pictures with them.

In a couple of days, they and their parents would be on a bus to meet with their sponsors in the United States, usually family.

I also attended a Mass in a large gymnasium and helped a frantic father search for his missing toddler, who it turns out was hanging out with a nun.

Come to think of it, I suppose I was involved in human smuggling too. I’m more than ready for my mug shot.

I think it is a dangerous and counterproductive thing to go after religious organizations that are operating within the law and are fulfilling their spiritual mission.

Paxton can try and paint Annunciation House and places like it as centers of human trafficking, gang members, drug smugglers and all other sorts of undesirables, but the truth is that they are simply a small, humane attempt to deal with one aspect of a larger, complicated crisis.

I am in full support of laws that will stop this overflow of humanity at the border, but attacking people of faith is a despicable and ineffective way of doing that.

So, until I see Abbott’s mug shot on Fox News, I will condemn the ridiculous assault on my church and its mission.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I try and avoid writing about Donald Trump, even though I voted for him twice.

But sometimes you cannot avoid the elephant in the room, literally.

As a preface, I have to admit that I understand why Trump is particularly upset these days. He has been the target of prosecutions that in most cases seem stretched to the legal limits and designed to influence an election.

Liberals reject that premise and believe that Trump incited a riot, that he paid “hush money” to a porn star for reasons other than trying to avoid sleeping on the couch, that he stole top secret documents so he could make copies and sell them as “Trump Confessions: My Presidential Memoir” and that he tried to stop Black people from voting in Georgia.

Of course, they all have their explanations for how these are legitimate prosecutions that have absolutely nothing to do with making sure Republicans are permanently barred from the White House, so arguing otherwise is screaming into the wind. I’ve no time for that. Let them believe what they want to believe.

The problem comes mostly from the other side, my side, which is unwilling to criticize the president other than to say that he says things he shouldn’t say, and so what?

I have had conversations with conservatives who excused the crude comments about encouraging a foreign aggressor to invade a hypothetical deadbeat NATO ally with an eye roll and this sort of reply: Well, they should pay up!

There is also the idea that since the economy was so much better under Trump — mine wasn’t — we should excuse these provocations and look at the bigger picture. For them unfortunately, the bigger picture doesn’t include our global interests.

Some might call me a globalist, because I view the United States in relation to the world and not as an island. I do not hate the U.N., although I have significant problems with some of its recent acts and initiatives. I see the value in NATO.

As an aside, the only time Article 5 was invoked, the one that requires all member nations to mobilize in favor of another member who’d been attacked by a foreign aggressor was after 9/11. In other words, to protect the U.S.

This growing isolationism on the part of Trump-supporting conservatives is quite troubling to me, and it’s not because I practice immigration law. It has to do with my pride in how we are viewed around the world, a reputation that I can promise you is being diminished with every offhanded “it’s your problem, don’t involve us” comment that emanates from the GOP.

I have been waiting for Donald Trump to do what so many world leaders, both current and former have done: condemn Vladimir Putin for having murdered Alexei Navalny. I don’t expect him to call Vlad a rat bastard, or some other similar term a la Joe Biden, but I do expect sympathy for his widow, and a solid attack on the man who wrongfully imprisoned, poisoned and then killed his most powerful rival.

I’ve waited a week, and the only thing to come from the former president is a rather narcissistic little whine about how Navalny’s sad destiny reminds him of himself. He used the occasion of the murder of a generational human rights activist to talk about how he, Donald Trump, had been persecuted by “leftists.”

I’m angry. I cannot believe the spin that I’ve heard from some on the right, questioning whether Navalny created his own problems or whether Putin really was involved in his death.

Only slightly less blameworthy are the people who have remained silent about this horrific human rights atrocity.

And it’s not just conservatives.

We had people filling the streets when George Floyd was killed, and to be honest, George Floyd was no Navalny.

So where are the cries from the so-called defenders of civil liberties? Where are those pretentious little children in their masks and with their “Free Palestine” placards screaming about the oppression of innocents?

I don’t even know what’s worse, the apathy or the selective empathy.

As a conservative in the Reagan-Thatcher-John Paul mold, my DNA compels me to rise up against tyrants.

That’s why my anger is strongest against my fellow travelers on the right, who have hitched their wagon to a man who compares his legal troubles to the death of a hero.

As for the left, I hope I’ve angered them enough that they’ve stopped reading by now.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

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Last week the country marked another Valentine’s Day, a reminder I haven’t had a traditional “Valentine” since my fiancée and I broke up in 2012.

To be honest, he broke up with me, after I had paid for some pretty expensive tickets to see the Orioles play a home game at Camden Yards as his birthday present. As I recall, he enjoyed himself immensely, allowed me to buy him a crab dinner at the Inner Harbor, and then on the way home north on I-95 he casually mentioned that he thought we should “take a break.”

That break ended with him refusing to answer any of my phone calls, or explaining why he had unceremoniously ghosted me (before that was a term). He did, however, graciously accept his engagement ring back, the one with the “flawless” albeit microscopic diamond.

While I haven’t been part of a couple that could have made it on Noah’s Ark, I have celebrated Valentine’s Day in many ways that are significantly more important than the forced pink-and-white-and-red stereotype that lines the pockets of Hallmark shareholders.

The holiday remains a wonderful opportunity to think about the connections we have with those who make our life more bearable. I have had so many in my life, from my family and friends, to old co-workers, to mentors and teachers, and even people I never had an opportunity to meet in person, but who touched me in unexpected ways.

One of them is a gentleman who passed away quite suddenly this month named John Cecil Price. John was a musician, a philosopher, a humanitarian, a deeply good man and someone who saw beyond color and gender to the best essence of everyone he encountered.

We only knew each other on “X, formerly known as Twitter,” but his daily commentaries and humorous observations made me wish we had grown up together, or at least shared a neighborhood.

In a sense we did inhabit the same block, filled with ideas instead of buildings, and I was all the richer for it. He will be missed by those of us who don’t need daily conversation and physical contact to create important relationships.

Another one of my “Valentines” is my client “Caridad,” who just recently obtained her green card. I will not narrate the details of what she went through to get to that point, a journey marked by emotional and physical challenges very few Americans can imagine.

Her story is her own, and I am just a bit player in the drama. But our lives intersected at the moment she decided to control her own future and abandon the country that neither nurtured nor protected her from untold abuse.

Yet another “Valentine” is the friend who, although no longer living a few streets away in Philadelphia, makes sure to reach out every week to either say hello, or make a coffee date when she comes back down from her new home in New York.

This may seem like a very simple and mundane thing, a hallmark of even a casual friendship, but it is much more than that.

Each of us can descend into loneliness, not the kind that kills or requires medication, not the kind that is written about in treatises or forms the core of great poetry, but the distinct moments in our days where we look around and wonder if anyone is listening.

It used to be called longing, or melancholy, and even in this fast-paced life that so many of us are leading, it creeps in and causes a dull but not insignificant pain. And that friend understands, and is there to say “I’m listening.”

I have a love for her that no card or chocolate could accurately reflect.

Valentine’s Day is a beautiful holiday, one whose scents and flavors and late winter colors brings delight to those fortunate enough to have found — at least for a weekend — what the Italians call “anima gemella,” or twinned spirit.

It is a frothy bubble, insubstantial but lovely while it lasts.

But the real Valentines are the ones who make an imprint on our hearts, imprints that might be as lasting as the stone carvings on the walls of pyramids, or as fleeting as the images drawn on frosted windows.

They have very little to do with romance, and everything to do with love.

I just wish I’d known that before wasting all that money on an Orioles game.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I was looking for something to watch the other night, so I practically screamed “Free Movies!” into my remote, and up popped a suggestion I’d been meaning to rent for weeks: “The Holdovers.”

In general terms, it’s about a teacher at a boarding school for boys who draws the short straw and is stuck babysitting for students who can’t go home for the Christmas holidays.

He starts with about five, but within a couple of hours most of the boys are claimed by their parents, all except one. And here is where the incredibly moving adventure begins.

Set in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War, the film alternates between comedy, drama and tragedy.

The young man who is the “last student standing” was essentially abandoned by his mother who just acquired a new husband and preferred a honeymoon to spending time with her son.

The teacher, played by the magnificent Paul Giamatti, reminds me of a cross between Mr. Chips and Ebeneezer Scrooge. He evolves from a misanthrope with a chip on his soldier and a bad case of body odor to a man who sacrifices his own career for the welfare of a lonely, struggling boy.

Over three decades ago, I spent a couple of years teaching at an all-boys school on the Main Line in suburban Philadelphia. My brother was an alumnus of Haverford, as well as many friends. I was Mademoiselle Fleurs, the French teacher, and while I doubt I was the best “professeur” they’d ever seen, I was a novelty for the boys.

There were exactly three women on the high school faculty, so that made me a bit of a unicorn. The blonde math teacher was the pretty one — besides being exceptionally smart — and the older female Spanish teacher was intimidating — besides being exceptionally smart — so I kind of fell into the “she grades on a curve and she’s nice” category.

My point in writing this is that I loved every minute of teaching those boys, who were a wonderful mixture of child and man. They were teenagers, most of them at the age of the boy in “The Holdovers,” and dealing with all of the struggles and joys that young males experience at that time in their lives.

I often say that I much preferred teaching boys to girls, because while boys were open books, girls were KGB agents: you had no idea what they were thinking, or about to do behind your back.

Watching the film reminded me that society has never been very good at raising boys. We often talk about how “it’s a man’s world” and girls are at a disadvantage.

We have Title IX in sports programs, and all of these initiatives to encourage girls to go into the STEM fields.

We get annoyed at the natural ebullience and energy of testosterone-fueled mini-males, calling it “disturbing” and try to neutralize it with mind altering drugs, but we rejoice when girls “find their voices.” Boys are encouraged to be silent, so girls can shout.

The most beautiful and moving part about “The Holdovers” is the relationship that develops between the young man and his initially reluctant teacher. It is subtle at first, laced with sarcasm and mutual distrust, transitions into a sort of grudging respect, and ends up breaking your heart.

The palpable love that has developed between the two of them, at a time when men weren’t supposed to have “feelings,” makes you realize that the only thing that matters, in the end, is being fully seen and accepted by someone who understands what you’re going through.

I don’t mean that in a Hallmark card, everyone gets a trophy kind of way. Our flaws and our mistakes are not things to celebrate, and our worst characteristics should be a source of shame.

What I mean is that human connection is extremely important, and our society is hardwired to believe that boys don’t need it as much as girls.

“The Holdovers” is a wonderful reminder of something I’ve known all my life: boys are not girls with more testosterone in them.

They are completely different creatures, and they need male role models because in a world that wants to criminalize masculinity, calling it “toxic” and waging witch hunts with hashtags, boys are an endangered species.

We even see the whole social media trend of “girl dads,” which is kind of stupid because pride in being a dad shouldn’t come with a gender tag.

I’d urge anyone with sons to watch this magnificent film.

Keep the tissues nearby. And go hug your boys — if they let you.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].