Tag Archives: Sargent Shriver

national news

POTUS steps in, restores money for Special Olympics

I suppose you can wonder about Donald Trump’s motives for practically any decision he makes.

He does things solely to protect his “brand.” The president is more worried about “ratings” than doing something for the public good. He hates being criticized.

However, he did the right thing today by overriding a proposal to strip $17 million out of the federal budget for Special Olympics.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was pulled through the proverbial sausage grinder in the House this week when members of Congress questioned why she would recommend gutting a program that has become a staple — albeit a tiny one — of the federal government.

Today, the president said he “overrode my people” and put the money back into the budget. “Special Olympics will be funded,” he declared at the White House.

Good show, Mr. President.

In the grand scheme of the federal budget, Special Olympics’ total amounts to a tiny fraction of the $4.7 trillion the government will spend on foreign and domestic policy programs. However, it is a high-profile program that draws plenty of emotional support from celebrities, politicians of both parties and just plain folks who have members of their families with special needs.

Special Olympics was the creation of the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her husband, the late Sargent Shriver. It was founded as a way for Mrs. Shriver to honor her sister, Rosemary, a special-needs individual. It has grown into an international event, drawing athletes from more than 100 countries.

The United States has become a major participant in this event and has always set aside money from the federal budget to keep the program afloat.

Thus, it is good that the president interceded.

medical news, national news

Nancy Reagan’s lasting legacy: Alzheimer’s awareness

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Nancy Reagan will be remembered for many noble and good things.

The former first lady — who died this past weekend at age 94 — was a champion for her husband, the 40th president of the United States. She became arguably his closest advisor and by many accounts was his best friend. She sought to protect his image and his legacy and most historians today she succeeded famously at protecting both of those things.

She also was an advocate for Alzheimer’s research and that’s what I want to focus on here.

You see, many of us have intimate knowledge of that disease.

On Nov. 5, 1994, President Reagan penned that astonishingly poignant farewell letter to the nation as he disclosed his diagnosis. He and his bride then said their “long goodbye” to each other. Nearly a decade later, President Reagan would succumb to the complications of that disease.

Read the president’s letter here.

I’ve told you at times of my own experience with the disease, having watched my mother wither away and die 32 years ago from its effects at the too-tender age of 61. Take my word for it: It ain’t pretty.

Other family members of well-known Americans have taken up the cause for Alzheimer’s research. I think most often of Maria Shriver, whose father — Sargent Shriver — was rendered helpless by the affliction before he died. Shriver has vowed to carry the fight forward.

Nancy Reagan sought to raise research funds. She lobbied Congress to do more for the families who are the actual sufferers of this malady. They are the victims, who watch their loved ones lose their cognitive skill, their memory, their ability to do simple things, such as bathe and eat.

All those things happened to her beloved husband and she fought as hard as she could until the day he died and later — until her own health deteriorated.

The world she leaves behind needs more powerful advocates who will take up the cudgel for other family members who must endure the heartbreak of Alzheimer’s disease.

Thank you, Mrs. Reagan, for the waging this noble effort.

We haven’t finished the fight just yet, but we’re a lot closer to declaring victory.

 

medical news

Shriver steps into Alzheimer’s battle

It’s presumptuous, I know, to refer to yourself and a famous person in the same sentence.

But I’ll do so anyway.

I feel Maria Shriver’s pain as she engages in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/13/opinions/shriver-wipe-out-alzheimers/index.html

This merciless killer claimed her father, the great Sargent Shriver, the way it took my own mother. It did so brutally and with extreme malice. It robbed Maria’s father of his towering intellect, just as it stole my own mother’s quick wit and intelligence.

I’m with Maria Shriver as she wages war on Alzheimer’s disease.

She notes in a CNN essay that the disease remains an unknown, despite the fact that it has claimed 5 million victims already — in the United States alone!

Her essay references a group called Wipe Out Alzheimer’s. Shriver writes: “We’re asking women to put together their own “brain trusts” in their communities — groups that will go out and do some muscular fund-raising. But equally important, these brain trusts will gather to discuss and disseminate information about what the disease is and isn’t. What are the warning signs we should look for in ourselves and our parents? What’s the difference between normal forgetfulness, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease? Can brain games or meditation slow cognitive decline? Do dietary supplements help?”

Shriver notes that women seem more inclined to get the disease than men. She also believes women hold the key to rounding up more money to pay for the research that is needed to fight this killer disease.

Shriver said: “It’s time for the narrative around Alzheimer’s to change. I remember when an HIV/AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence. I remember when cancer was a dirty word, and the prognosis was always grim. But AIDS and cancer activists are helping to take these diseases from terrifying to treatable, from hopeless to hopeful. We want to do the same with Alzheimer’s. We want to understand it, prevent it, treat it and beat it. Wipe Out Alzheimer’s is creating a global community of women activists, agitators and agents of change to do just that.”

You go, Maria Shriver. I’m betting you’ll find a lot of men ready and able to join the fight, too.

political news

Campaign button brings back cool memory

Cleaning and rearranging my desk this week brought me in touch with a memento of a long-ago event that means much to me to this day.

It is a campaign button, given to me not many years ago by a gentleman — a friend of mine — who had a similar political coming of age at the same time.

It is a McGovern-Shriver presidential campaign button.

I cast my first vote for president on Nov. 7, 1972 for Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota and former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver of Maryland. McGovern was the presidential nominee selected at a tumultuous Democratic National political convention in Miami; his running mate, Shriver, wasn’t his first pick, as you’ll recall. The first selection was Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, who then revealed he had gone through treatment for depression; McGovern dumped him because at the time the public didn’t understand fully that Eagleton was cured of whatever ailed him.

But that was a vote of which I remain perhaps most proud of all the votes I’ve ever cast for any candidate running for any office.

I was nearly 23 years of age. The Constitution had been amended the previous year granting 18-year-olds the right to vote. But because the voting was still 21 when I was 18, I couldn’t vote in the 1968 election — even though I had a keen interest in that contest.

My own interest came from uncertainty about the Vietnam War and whether we were engaging in a conflict that was worth fighting. I had just returned home from my own service in the Army and came away from my time in Vietnam asking questions about the wisdom of our continuing along that futile course.

There also was that break-in at the Watergate office complex that would grow into a significant constitutional crisis.

Sen. McGovern was a war hero who rarely mentioned his combat service along the campaign trail. Meanwhile, his Republican foes kept denigrating his opposition to the Vietnam War as some sort of chicken-hearted cop-out. This man knew war. He’d fought it from the air as a bomber pilot in Europe during World War II.

McGovern’s opposition to the Vietnam War didn’t sell in the final analysis. Even though public opinion was deeply split on that war, McGovern would lose the election almost immediately after the polls closed. The TV networks declared President Nixon’s re-election literally within minutes of the polls closing.

It was over. Just like that.

I had taken on a duty for the McGovern campaign in my home state of Oregon. I helped spearhead a voter-registration effort at the community college I was attending. Our task was to register young Democrats to vote that year. We did well on the campus.

As a result — I’d like to think — Multnomah County went for McGovern narrowly over Nixon that year. Mission accomplished in our tiny portion of the world.

I’ve voted in every presidential election since. This was the first — and so far only — election in which I served as a foot soldier in a cause in which I believed. By the time 1976 rolled around, my journalism career had just begun. Therefore, all I could do was vote.

The campaign button reminds me of how idealistic I was in those days. It also reminds me of how much energy I possessed as a young man who saw politics as fun, exciting and quite noble.

Age has rubbed some of that idealism and energy away. But only some of it.