Quote of the Day: Steven Spielberg on Optimism, Sex Abuse, and a Rant About the Shutdown

“Well, look. To be Jewish, you have to be optimistic, because if you’re not we would have perished in the desert. We’d never have reached the end of that 40-year hike. We would all have perished without optimism.”

This statement could be interpreted as a sort of in-joke.  It comes from a Guardian interview  in which Spielberg explained that he felt the urgent need to make “The Post” because of Don the Con’s ascension, not because of the sexual abuse scandal that erupted while the film was being made.  In the film, Meryl Streep plays the woman who owned the Washington Post at the time of the Watergate scandal; she portrays the oppressive feeling that women used to get when surrounded by men, even when they were nominally in charge. 

The revelations about Harvey Weinstein are, in their own way, as bad as the things that are coming to light about Don the Con, who has already labelled Chuck Schumer as “Shutdown Schumer” — as if he didn’t set up the confrontation that forced Democrats to demand the inclusion of DACA reinstatement in the current continuing resolution.  McConnell piled on by saying that “the Democrats are willing to shut down the government over the protection of some illegal aliens” even though time is running out to restore the  lives and futures of people brought to this country illegally as children who are trying mightily to fit in to the only society they have ever known.  These people– people who were brought here illegally as children and have lived here since then– cannot be dismissed by the phrase “illegal aliens.”

(The image of prayers at the Western Wall is from pixabay.)