This week has been a busy week. America has been devastated by storms. There is continued unrest in the world. To sum it all up, people are dying in the United States and around the world. Now let’s get back to the endless coverage of the Prince and Princess Wedding.

If you’ve been watching the evening news or news networks it has been all about the wedding. I don’t know about you, but I really got tired of hearing about it a long time ago. However, when it continued to dominate the press coverage as Americans were suffering and dying right here at home, that’s when it became obscene. The only tasteful consideration for the suffering Americans that I saw was NBC Nightly News. They had planned to broadcast from London for the wedding and had even flown to London. When the extent of the Alabama tornadoes became apparent, they flew back and shifted their location and lead story to Alabama. Maybe others did this too, but I am not aware of it. None the less, they still placed the wedding ahead of the unrest and massacres in Syria. So for those of you who do not know what has been going on, aside from the wedding, below are the headlines from CNN and MSNBC. There is a great deal going on in the world...

Comedian John Stewart, host of Comedy Central's cable TV program, has been a significant force in moving legislation on medical care for 9-11 responders sickened by the toxic materials in the air following the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Now, after securing funding nearly 10 years later, Stewart alerts his views to a complete travesty of legislative overreaching.

The Civil War is the topic of the month, this 150th anniversary month of the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, which initiated that armed conflict. Leonard Pitts, whom I consider a good man, and whom I respect greatly, has written that the real motive of the influential Southerners who were the Secession decision-makers was the perpetuation of human slavery. He cited documents and private correspondence to that effect. It may be true that the motives of the decision-makers were as Leonard Pitts proposes. In human history the pattern has occurred often, that people who did not create an evil, but profited from it nevertheless, perpetuated that evil. But it does not follow that those ordinary persons who volunteered to defend their homelands, or were conscripted according to the laws then in effect in their states, were traitors, or that their memories as veterans-of-war should not be honored.

My wife and I, between us, have eleven ancestors, of whom we know, on the Daughters of the American Revolution Patriot Index. These ancestors, for the most part, had humble and short-lived roles in that conflict, yet they are honored greatly. (We both, also, had ancestors who fought as Loyalists. They participated in good faith, but are not honored.) My wife and I both had ancestors who fought as Confederate soldiers throughout the whole four years of the Civil War, enduring wounds, illness, pain, and deprivation.

On April 4, 2011 I drove to downtown San Jose, California to attend a rally for workers' rights. The rally was sponsored by We Are One, and it honored Martin Luther King Jr.'s support of the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike of 1968. The We Are One rally was a great event, with people from all walks of life supporting the workers in Wisconsin and the rights of workers everywhere.

I walked around the crowd asking people if I could take their photos and they were all very happy to oblige. What impressed me were all the different types of workers who attended, from teachers to fire fighters to electrical engineers to technicians. Many of the people that I talked to were inspired by the workers in Wisconsin and the protesters in Egypt and the Middle East. The speakers were great too, especially Cindy Chavez, who was in the San Jose City Council and now a teacher at San Jose State University. Interspersed in this blog are photos that I took of the event.

I previously posted on this topic. This has generated more discussion on Facebook. I have found this discussion to be interesting. It is enlightening to see how many Americans think and what they believe. I surely did not convince them of my points, but I think the discourse is educational. So I am going to do “Part 2" here. I hope this can be educational and enriching for you as well.

The key posts that took place after I posted the link to my article were:

"I personally believe in the Biblical and Third World models of national economics - "IF YOU DON'T WORK - THEN YOU DON'T EAT!"

I was on Facebook today. I saw something that a good friend of mine had written and the resulting comments.

Mr Obama: not all folks who have money inherited it from their rich parents like your Harvard classmates did.Some of us worked hard to succeed.To get where I am took lots of weekend nights in the library when I should have been out with friends.It took eight years of post graduate education and 12 years in the military,away from home,to finance that education.Demonizing people who work hard does not bring "Hope"!

Statistics are one thing; people are another.

According to a 2009 report in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, hotel employees, and especially housekeepers, have relatively higher rates of occupational injury, and sustain more severe injuries, than most other service workers. This was not a surprising conclusion. A 2005 survey of 941 hotel room cleaners found that during a twelve-month period, 75 percent experienced work-related pain, 83 percent report taking pain medication for discomfort due to work, and 62 percent reported work-related pain that forced them to visit a doctor.

There is a reason for this, of course.

My local daily newspaper recently took, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong, one small step for a newspaper, but one giant leap for newspaperkind. Or did it?

What did our newspaper do? They noted that a particular story (or, really, an on-going series) is "sponsored by ...."

Name of the game seems to be ‘sock it to the working people and protect the rich even more.'

From the time I left home to the time her mind became too clouded with Alzheimer’s disease to do so, my mother wrote to me once or twice a week, newsy letters about family, friends, and neighbors. We kept up a long, steady correspondence during the years before e-mail ended the practice of letter writing.

My mother did not have a college education, but she was intelligent, artistic, and adept at math. At one point she went to business college, taking enough classes to allow her to work as a bookkeeper at the Empire District Electric Company. Then, after all us kids grew up and left home, she began working as a tax preparer.

Yes, I know it is an absurd notion. However, it is a just and nonpartisan notion. Regardless of which party you are, you have to believe that our troops sacrifice allot. Our troops work long hours, weekends and holidays; and that is in peacetime. In combat they spend months in harms way. Sometimes they have only the most basic of supplies. They do not quit. They do not do a half-ass job. They do not go on vacation before their work is done. They stand their watch. They say to themselves, "America will not fall, not on my watch."

The fight over spending cuts is a fight over peanuts when you look at the total national spending. Cuts are being made to the programs with the least ability to resist or the least inside connection to find the funds somewhere else in the maze of projects and programs.

A freshman congressman from the state of Washington has promised her constituents that she will find the funds somewhere else to replace the $10 million cut in funds intended for Port of Vancouver work.

A Representative from Ohio is seeking to restore funding for a project in his State that falls under the House’s budget cut. A $20 million transportation grant for N.H. falls under the axe. Senators and Representatives of N.H. and Maine are working feverishly and promising to get funding elsewhere for that project. There are many more examples of this sort that are peanuts in terms of trillion dollar deficits. Remember the Alaskan bridge to nowhere? I haven’t heard from their, now famous, ex governor suggesting that Alaska reimburse the Federal Treasury to help in deficit reductions.

Though very much an anomaly, our Everyday Citizen database was "offline" due to a weird and unrepeatable technical snafu for almost 3 weeks! We are happy to say that it's now completely fixed. We thank all of you for your patience.

Readership continues to grow at this site. Just in the last month, we had 704,238 hits (visits) - even though much of the that time, our writers were unable to post new content due to the extremely rare technical difficulties! In a normal, unfettered month, we have over 900,000 and during one recent month we even crested the million hit mark. These are, without a doubt, very respectable stats for a website of this kind. I believe it is because Everyday Citizen has high quality writers and thoughtful commenters.

And, the good news abounds! This widely acclaimed excellent citizen journalism site, founded in 1997, is fully re-tweaked, re-wired and very sturdy. Good to go for years to come. Writers can rest assured that their archives are working perfectly and are well protected with multiple backups. Our dedicated readers can now return frequently to find new content. New visitors can learn more by reading about our Directory of Writers, our Table of Contents and More About Us.

On April 5 — one day after the We Are One rallies -- over 175 college campuses in 37 states will be participating in a national teach-in on debt, austerity, and corporate greed.

The teach-in is being organized by two long-time pro-labor public intellectuals, sociologist Francis Fox Piven and philosopher Cornell West.

Scheduled for April 5th at 2 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Savings Time), the event seeks to counter the drumbeat of right-wing propaganda. Content will be streamed live to teach-ins organized in local communities from the national teach-in at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. The local teach-ins will use the streamed material and add their own speakers that focus on their community. DSA has endorsed this program and is encouraging local groups and YDS chapters to organize local events that connect to the national teach-in. Jobs with Justice, the Student Labor Action Project, and others are promoting the teach-in.