3/30/2021

My Dear Friend & POTUS, JRB,

            It’s a blustery day here & the wind is knocking the remaining blossoms off of the crab apple trees sprinkling the ground with white petals. When it gets this way, I fantasize about having a wind generator on my house which would ameliorate the aggravation that comes from all this tumult. DC has gorgeous weather today. I hope you get to enjoy it.

            Perhaps you can take SBA administrator, Isabella Casillas Guzman (ICG) on a walk after you sign the PPP Extension Act today. I think it’s great that the smallest businesses will get to move to the front of the line for loan approval. I just hope those sole proprietors are good at filling out paperwork. Hopefully, ICG has plenty of staff on hand to help with that.

            Did you hear about the garbage strike in Yangon? Folks are throwing their trash on the street corners in protest of the Tatmadaw. Those Burmese young folks are proving their abilities to organize, & they keep coming up with new ways to gum up the works. I admire their tenacity.

            Hannah Beech’s article in the NYT, Inside Myanmar’s Army, should be required reading for all US citizens. It shows the danger of the military having too much power where “soldiers live, work and socialize apart from the rest of society, imbibing an ideology that puts them far above the civilian population.” Fortunately, we have social media now & we know that young folk are subject to peer pressure which gives me hope that the lure of pop culture & desire for freedom will overwhelm the pressure on the soldiers to yield to authority.

            HYITL,