Prescription Packaging, Brian Williams, & Rachel Dolezal

Last night on the national news, there was a segment about a new way to package prescription medications, each pharmacy with a machine that would put all daily meds for any given prescriber into little cello-wrapped bags. The point was that too many people, especially seniors, make errors when putting their medication into pill boxes. Whoa! And the inventors of this machine suggest that there wouldn’t be errors putting pills into bags at the pharmacy? The logistics of such a device stun me. Too many prescriptions, too many prescribers old and young, too many changes in prescriptions. There would have to be just as many errors made as the ones made by old-timers fumbling pills into their weekly pill boxes. Good idea but with probable bad results.

NBC probably won’t be bringing Brian Williams back from his four-month suspension for lying on air. I wonder where he might go from here. I see another network hiring him to report the news on something much less than a national level. Or maybe he’ll just retire to write his memoirs . . . or his obituary But who would trust him to tell the truth about his life? I and a lot of others really liked Brian without realizing the level of his egotism.

Talk about a tempest in a teapot. Or maybe a cyclone in an inkwell. We have in the national news the story of Rachel Dolezal—president of the Spokane, Washington, NAACP—who had proclaimed her ethnicity as African-American and has now been shamed into resigning her post. In the truly bad old days of slavery in this country, anyone who had even a drop of black blood in his ancestry was considered to be Black, Negroid, African-American. Didn’t matter how white the skin, it was still black. And now Ms. Dolezal is being hounded by the media and the public and even her parents for wanting to cross races, for her transracial stance. Who should really give a good damn? We’re living in an age when America really is becoming a melting pot, when all races are combining into one relatively dark/light-skinned people. And isn’t that a good thing?

I look at Halle Berry,

Vanessa Williams, and

Beyonce Knowles (to name only a few) and I see beautiful women, not beautiful Black or White women, just beautiful women. So why should so many people care that Rachel Dolezal was pretending to be black? So what?