Pulling into the parking lot of Moe’s dog run this morning, my husband Hersh and I noticed an SUV parked next to us, flying a huge American flag with 1776 emblazoned on it.

We both remarked out loud with similar derisive tones: “Trumper!”

Later, when we returned and the flag-adorned car was still there, we had a change of heart. We noticed there were no Trump bumper stickers or any other identifying marks to confirm their MAGA allegiance.

We had both jumped to that conclusion.

Why couldn’t this car festooned with Stars and Stripes just be a patriotic person?

The automatic assumption that a flag represents the conservative Right and the worst of the Right at that was disheartening. I resent that they’ve co-opted our flag.

Very quietly and almost wistfully Hersh remarked, “I would fly a flag.”

For a moment I was taken aback a bit hearing this from my husband who as a young man was a bona fide leftie who had hung with the likes of Abbie Hoffman.

And then words I’ve never heard him say before hung in the air. This long ago, once upon a time, child refugee said quietly:

“I  wouldn’t be here if this country wasn’t free…”

Those words have never felt as prescient.

I want that America back.

I want our America back.

VOTE Blue

I’m mad that the right has co-opted not only the waving of the American flag,  but owning the slogan to make America great again.

Damn, I want to “make America great again.”

I want to scream it from the rooftops.

Make America Great Again by voting out all the Republicans, by making Trump accountable for all his corruption, cons, and cruelty.

Make America Great Again by voting Blue!

My husband was just about to take our dog Moe on a walk when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the cap Hersh was wearing. Without blinking, I quickly snatched it off his head.

“No more Red Caps!” I screeched in a voice worthy of Joan Crawford in her infamous tirade against wire hangers.

Despite this being a 20-year-old cap bearing white type for an oyster house in Cape Cod, its resemblance to the infamous MAGA one was too close for comfort.

Especially so close to elections.

In a neighborhood whose lawns are littered with Republican red cardboard campaign signs, any visual sign that could be seen as support is off limits.

Though I like to think of myself as being color blind, when it comes to politics I’m true blue. Praying for a blue wave, just the thought of political maps awash in red on election night sends shivers down my blue state spine.

Today it’s almost universally accepted by Americans that there are blue states like New York and red states like Texas. That Republicans are “red” and Democrats are “blue.” These colors are so ingrained in our sensibilities as part of an identity as Republicans or Democrats.

It would be reasonable to assume these must be the official colors of these two parties and have been used for over a hundred years, right?

Nope.

Republicans haven’t always been associated with the color red, nor have Democrats affiliated their party with Blue.

In fact, the whole notion of consistently attaching a particular hue to each political party is a relatively new concept in the U.S.

In 1976, when NBC’s first-on-air election map lit up blazing with red, I was ecstatic. It was my first presidential election, and I had picked a winner.

Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter.

Blue and Red originally had nothing to do with the parties.

NBC debuted the first full-color electronic electoral map on TV, and chose blue to represent the incumbent party and red to represent the challenger. In that year, the Republican Party was in power, so the “blue states” were the states projected to go to incumbent Gerald Ford, and the “red states” were projected to go to Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter.

As election results flowed in on the night of November 2, 1976, lightbulbs in each state lit up, changing from undecided white to Republican blue and Democratic red.

The same year, ABC News used a small version that used yellow for Ford, blue for Carter, and red for states in which votes had yet to be tallied.

When Nobody Could Agree on a Color Scheme

NBC News 1988 electoral map marked states by Republican George H.W. Bush in blue and states won by Democrat Michael Dukakis in red.

The feature proved to be so popular that, 4 years later, all three major television networks used colors to designate the states won by the presidential candidates, though not all using the same color scheme.

So, depending on the election or the network, red and blue were variously assigned to Democrats and Republicans. There was no uniformity in the maps that TV stations, newspapers, or magazines used to illustrate presidential elections.

Ronald Reagan Blue

NBC newsman David  famously referred to the 1980 election map outcome showing Republican Ronald Reagan’s 44-state landslide in blue as resembling a “suburban swimming pool.”

Reagan’s landslide victory painted the map almost entirely blue, which is a strange thing to picture now, given how thoroughly Reagan became the patron saint of the red party

The notion that there were red states or blue states and that the former were republican and the latter democratic wasn’t ingrained in the national psyche until 2000.

The colors representing incumbent vs. challenger being different across the networks continued up until the 2000 election, when the results between Bush and Gore were disputed.

As different TV networks (and the printed publications citing them) were referring to different “red states” and “blue states” on their maps, it created a lot of confusion, resulting in the media outlets eventually deciding to be consistent in their map coloring.

They agreed to use NBC’s original color scheme: blue for incumbent, and red for challenger.

At that time, the Democrats happened to be the incumbent party and the Republicans were the challenger.

Two Americas

By the 2002 midterms, journalists were already writing about “two Americas: red and blue” as though the country had sorted itself into two coherent cultures overnight.

“Blue state” and “red state” had become so synonymous with “Democrat state” and “Republican state” that, by the 2004 elections, the original incumbent/challenger coloring scheme was tossed out in favor of leaving them as Democrat/Republican, and the colors have remained as representing the parties ever since.

By then, the vocabulary was everywhere, carrying connotations that nobody had assigned it on purpose. Red became associated with rural America, the religious, the South and the interior West; blue with cities, more secular population, the coasts and college towns.

Now red has become the symbol of conservatism and intolerance. As an accident of media history, the current colors are evidence of the randomness and instability of political color codes.

But for now I still draw the red line at red caps.

The constant cruelty is just crushing.

The MAGA moral compass is not just cracked; it is irretrievably broken.

Calling a brutal warmongering dictator a humanitarian?

Forsaking our allies with abandon?

Mocking and criticizing an actress for the pain and misery she’s been suffering from an unknown health condition. I’m talking to you, Megyn Kelly, and your latest cruelty to Christina Applegate

Calling a survivor of childhood rape a liar?

Imagine using a raped 12-year-old’s personal family trauma in a political campaign ad? Imagine dredging up your opponent’s childhood sexual abuse and using it for political points.

Weaponizing a woman’s childhood is unconscionable

Our president wrote a depraved and lengthy screed on Truth Social defending the despicable Ramaswamy ad attacking Amy Acton, defending it, saying,

“Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would; it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt.'”

Of course this dirtbag would. It’s exactly something this monster would use.

Trump explicitly urged Ramaswamy to keep the ad on the airwaves, arguing the press only labeled it bad “because it’s so good!”

Good? We are living in 2 different universes. This is pure evil.

We are so broken.

Trumps Truth Social Post supporting Ramaswamy ad

A few days ago I had one of those wonderful human connections.

I was walking into my local supermarket when I noticed a woman of color of a certain age sitting alone on the low stone wall at the entrance. She had a patina of melancholy on her beautiful face, and I stopped to say hi. She loved my T-shirt, she said, a shirt that spells out the word Human in a rainbow of colors, and I thanked her and said:

“We’re all human.”

“You got that right,” she replied, nodding.

She mentioned she was resting for a while before she went inside.

“I’m missing my husband, ” the woman said sadly. I expressed how sorry I was, and then she said, almost apologetically, “It’s been 2 years.”

I looked at her gently and said what I knew in my heart to be the truth. Grief has no timeline; it could be 4 years, it could be 10. The grief and the missing never end.

There’s no expiration date.

We then got into a conversation about grief and loved ones, and when I left, I told her to take all the time in the world with her grief and her heart. She smiled so kindly.

As did I. This human connection made my day.

The timing of the conversation was serendipitous.

The following morning Moe was wagging his tail especially vigorously as our mailman handed me a small package. What a delight to open it and find my copy of a special book, “Grieving Out Loud,” an anthology that I am so proud to have several essays included in.

As I flipped through the pages, I was transported back to the fall and an amazing workshop I attended, named “Grieving Out Loud,” led by Amy Ferris and B.K.Jackson. It was where this book was birthed, in a supportive and powerful community of women storytellers.

The workshop is part of a series from Noon Miracle, an international production house and collaborative platform founded by actress, writer, and director Jane Sibbett, alongside co-founders Violet Grace Fink and Ruby Fink.

An amazing group of brilliant souls who opened their hearts, touched their truths, and used their voices to share in that unavoidable part of life that is grief. It was an honor and a privilege to grieve out loud together.

To connect through our shared humanity.

Like the woman in the supermarket,

There is so much grief in our lives right now; let us all hold one another.

Copies are available to order online

Grieving Out Loud

We were warned.

Trump is totally trashing the post-WWII system of global security to ally the U.S. with a Russian Dictator.

We didn’t need a crystal ball to warn us of the tragedy we are living in now.

A prescient Hillary Clinton sounded the alarm

The majority of Americans chose not to listen.

There is No Debate: Trump is Putin’s Puppet

A Russian controlled puppet placed in the White House was the stuff of Cold War paranoia.

Ten years ago, we were warned by Hillary Clinton that Donald Trump was Putin’s Puppet. On October 19, 2016, the Secretary of State stood on a stage in Las Vegas during the final presidential debate and accused Trump of being a puppet to the Russian president, willing to “spout the Putin Line.”

A Russian-controlled puppet placed in the White House was the stuff of Cold War paranoia and pop culture.

And now Vladimir Putin has done what the Soviets long dreamed of accomplishing- a Russian-controlled puppet placed in the White House.

The vodka must be flowing in hell as Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev are gleefully toasting each other on what Vlad has achieved.

Once the stuff of Cold War paranoia, spy novels and movies, the Russians have infiltrated our democracy and placed an asset in the White House.

The accusations of Russia’s interference in our government have sent a big chill down my spine, as childhood memories of the Cold War are quickly defrosted.

Putin has achieved the objectives that Russia has been pursuing for decades, namely expanding Russia’s sphere of influence and undermining the US as a dominant international force, especially in Europe. Putin’s long dream was to separate the U.S. from NATO, breaking up a strong alliance for 80 years.

Mission accomplished.

After 10 years of Trump insisting that reports  of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are watching one man tear apart the global system of order and security under which we have lived for 80 years in order to be with Putin

Trump has made it clear that he will not protect NATO allies from Russian aggression. He is actively dismantling America’s alliances, just as Russia planned. Abandoning Ukraine in favor of Putin makes it clear where Trump’s loyalty lies.

The entire post-World War II order has gone up in smoke.

It is unthinkable.

And we were warned.

In an era of student power, women were still pretty powerless when it came to their bodies. How much has changed? Playboy Magazine, September 1969. Sex on Campus Issue. Playmate Bunny Shay Knuth, a saucy south of the border sweetie, is “one of Mexico City’s comeliest coeds”

With the dialogue about college sexual assault very much on the public consciousness, I decided to pull out this vintage Playboy from September 1969 -its Sex on Campus Issue.

It’s as bad as you might imagine. In our culture, with its long history of male entitlement, it shouldn’t be surprising that a mid-century Playboy Magazine once featured a guide for scoring some action at colleges.

It’s hard to imagine there was a time when this sort of behavior was played for laughs.

For better and for worse getting action and college have long been linked.

“Campus Action Chart” Playboy Magazine September 1969 illustration by Bob Post

In this 1969 guide for the horny young man, the best prospects for scoring some action were college.

Boola Boola!

Reporting from the front lines of the sexual revolution, Playboy’s 1969 “Campus Action Chart” rated 25 different schools as it did the year before. Playboy explained:

“In descending order of permissiveness- the chart’s upper reaches being mecca for the scholarly hedonist, it’s lower depths monasteries for the sexually meek.”

“Campus Action Chart” Playboy Magazine September 1969 illustration by Bob Post. Stanford makes the top 10.

Playboy continues:

“As our campus action chart reveals politics hasn’t usurped the attention of all students. (Not all students were out protesting the war, anti establishment). The survey imaginatively illustrated by Bob Post, Playboy’s assistant art director, proves that far friendlier extracurricular activities are also on the rise. Many male students, we found, prefer to occupy coed beds rather than administrative buildings but each school imposes its own restrictions on undergraduate freedoms.

“Campus Action Chart” Playboy Magazine September 1969 illustration by Bob Post

The 25 schools span a cross-section of types ( Ivy mega-university, state, small, sexually segregated, etc) and represent every demographic area of the U.S.

“Campus Action Chart” Playboy Magazine September 1969 illustration by Bob Post

Each schools ratings was derived from a number of variables some tangible ( dorm hours, availability of women on and off campus) and some intangible ( mod of the students atmosphere generated b the faculty etc). What we’ve done is save you the trouble of plowing thru sociological journals to extract pertinent nuggets.

Depending on your personal proclivities and your academic status at the moment, a perusal of the chart will tell you where to go to college or where you should have gone if you had known.

Interspersed with the articles are some good hearty college laffs:

“Don’t any of you leave until you each promise not to tell.” Vintage cartoon, Playboy Magazine, Sept. 1969 by Buck Brown

Sex in Academe

Playboy Magazine September 1969 illustration Bob Post

Revolting

In that era of free love and student revolting,  sex was often not so free and often had a steep price to pay, the haunted memories lasting a lifetime. It was revolting.

Be Prepared. Vintage ad Mr Hicks Casuals from Playboy Sept. 1969

It is only now that young women can give voice to the rapes and sexual assaults that have been occurring for decades on college campuses.

There was no name for “date rape” before the 1980s, but how many women of a certain age are haunted by memories of waking up in a stranger’s room, naked, disoriented, realizing they’d been sexually assaulted. Hungover from a boozy party, they blame only themselves and the alcohol for the assault that was perpetrated on them.

There was no outrage because no one would listen. In an era filled with protesting, their voices of protest were ignored.

In an era of student power, women were still pretty powerless.

The hallmark of a rape victim.

I am a collector.

I collect ephemera, old advertisements, newspapers, worn magazines, yellowing scraps of paper, the forgotten minutiae and stuff of everyday life that can reveal things we might not otherwise ever learn.

My home is a paper trail of my past, a repository of objects whose stories I feel compelled to preserve.

I come from a family of savers. Though I prefer to think of us as saviors, rescuing discarded fragments of the past from oblivion. We saved things. Held on to them. Tucked them away for safekeeping, sometimes long after they had outlived their usefulness.

But my family collected something else, too.

Secrets.

A boatload of them.

Secrets we kept from the outside world and secrets we kept from one another.

Locked Away

Like the objects that fill my home, I stored my secrets carefully, packing them away in the dark recesses of memory.  Some were too painful to ever see the light of day. Others were wrapped in layers of shame, their contents too radioactive to reveal. But like toxic waste, the fallout from these could last for decades.

Buried beneath the accumulated debris of a life, one secret remained in storage for more than half a century.

For 52 years, I held onto a story I could not tell.

52 years is a long time to keep something hidden. Long enough for an 18-year-old college girl to become a 71-year-old woman. Long enough for the world to change, for generations to come and go, for words that once couldn’t be spoken of to become part of our everyday vocabulary.

In 1973 when  I was 18, something happened to me at a college fraternity that I could never speak about.

It was a time when women were being encouraged to embrace their newfound freedom, but the old rules of shame and silence remained firmly in place. Liberation might have been fashionable, but blaming women for what happened to them was a tradition that refused to go out of style.

So I packed the experience away. Tightly closed the lid.

Fifty-two years passed.

Then last week the news of the drugging and gang rape at a Cornell University fraternity broke through the protective layers I had so carefully constructed. Suddenly, the past wasn’t safely tucked away in some dark corner of memory. It spilled into the present.

I knew that girl. I had been that girl.

I began to think about all the other women of my generation who had grown up absorbing the same messages about shame, blame, and silence. How many were still carrying experiences they had never been able to speak about?

I wanted them to know they weren’t alone.

So I did something that ran counter to everything I had learned about keeping secrets.

I opened the box.

When HuffPost published my essay this past week about my rape at a Syracuse University fraternity, I felt as though I had taken something intensely private out of storage and placed it in full view. My carefully guarded secret was suddenly available to strangers everywhere with a click of a mouse.

The story traveled, appearing on Yahoo News and MSN, gathering readers and shares.

And then something extraordinary happened.

Reaching Out

I had hoped other women might recognize themselves in my words. I hadn’t imagined how many were waiting for that recognition. I had opened a door into a crowded room with women who had been waiting, sometimes for a lifetime, to speak

Hundreds of women began writing to me, often at remarkable length, entrusting me with deeply personal accounts of sexual abuse and assault. Some were strangers. Others were women I had known for years. Many were my contemporaries, women in their seventies and even eighties who had carried their own secrets through marriages, motherhood, careers, and entire lifetimes.

Their words were heartbreaking, intimate, sometimes hesitant. I recognized the silences between their sentences as clearly as the words themselves.

Their stories poured out in paragraphs. They appeared in comments on social media, in private messages and emails. I was struck not only by what they told me, but by how urgently they seemed to need to tell it. Decades of silence were finally finding words. Women who had been young in an era when shame so often fell on the victim were finally putting words to experiences they had locked away.

A New Collection

I had spent decades collecting fragments of the past, believing each artifact contained a story worth preserving. Now I found myself receiving another collection: stories that had never been given a safe place to exist.

I couldn’t change what happened to these women any more than I could change what happened to me, but I could listen; I could bear witness. Darkness becomes less isolating when we discover we are not alone in it.

Perhaps that is what it means to light the way for others. Not to illuminate every dark corner or promise the darkness will disappear, but to hold a light steady enough that someone else feels less afraid to step forward.

My heart was my torch. I found compassion can illuminate places that shame has kept dark. One woman’s willingness to speak can give another the courage to find her own words. Compassion gave me the courage to carry it into a place I had feared entering for more than half a century

And if that small flame helps another woman find her voice, then perhaps the light I carried out of my own darkness can help illuminate a path for someone else.

I used my voice so others could use theirs.

This week, HuffPost published one of the most difficult personal essays I’ve written.

I was 19 when the events in this story took place. For decades, I couldn’t fully speak about what happened. The Catalyst at Cornell was the tipping point for me, breaking down decades of internal defense infrastructure I had built up. I had been wracked with shame.

Since publication, one of the most meaningful responses has come from women who recognize parts of their own histories in mine.

That’s one of the reasons I believe in personal storytelling: the story may begin with one person, but it rarely remains hers alone.

I needed to use my voice, so that others could find theirs too. 

Please Read the HuffPost Article

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sally-edelstein-college-sexual-assault-cornell-fraternity_n_6abec4b5e4b02a789b340b7d/amp

I can’t stop thinking of those pictures of a slumping, sleeping Donald Trump at the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial ceremony. I remarked to friends at the time how he looked so woefully out of place at this important national occasion.

His demeanor and body language were more fitting for a patient in a nursing home.

Suddenly I remembered an old pen and ink drawing I did when I was about eleven depicting an “Old Age Home” filled with an assortment of aging tropes of oldsters. Sorting through my flat files I found it among the hundreds of childhood drawings I had saved.

Original drawing by Sally Edelstein 1967 with a modern day twist. Re-purposed art.

I decided to update it to include a doddering Donnie nodding off. He seems to fit right in, snoozing in the common room of the Old Folks Home and not at a solemn ceremony as our commander in chief.

Capt. Though Donnie was drawn with a felt tip pen, the original was drawn with a nib and India ink Donlad would be drawn with a Tombow Mono drawing pen, no ink bottle involved

Cartooning The Head & Figure by Jack Hamm 1967

As a child in the 1960s, I spent hours and hours hunched over on my bed drawing story after story, with visions of becoming a cartoonist when I grew up. Though I may have learned to draw bowls of fruit with Jon Neghy, I learned cartooning from a variety of cartoon instructional sources. Along with sampling the styles of legends like Mort Drucker or Jack Davis in Mad Magazine, Mort Walker from the funnies, and the folks from Harvey comic books, I devoured cartooning How-To books

My favorite was entitled “Cartooning the Head and Figure.” It was an instructional book from 1967 that provided tried and proven methods that explain step-by-step procedures in the art of cartooning.”

I carefully studied the art techniques from this soft-bound book.

No modern Flair pens for me- I used a nib and India ink to draw.  The wildly popular felt-tip pen with its vibrant, quick-drying ink had debuted in 1966 and changed writing forever.

But never for drawing for me. The ritual was part of the skill. Selecting the proper size metal nib, you inserted it using the small metal notches in the center of the nib holder, dipping it in the bottle of Higgins India Ink, always so careful not to spill any ink on my chenille bedspread.

Cartooning The Head & Figure by Jack Hamm 1967

I knew I still had the book stashed at home in my bookcase, so I pulled out the familiar, well-worn copy. Flipping through the different chapters, I was particularly interested in their section on drawing old folks

Not surprisingly, it was chock full of typical yet disturbing old age stereotypes.

Cartooning The Head & Figure by Jack Hamm 1967

Older women were skewered. Next to ditzy female drivers and meddling battle-axe mothers-in-law, the older woman was a favorite of cartoonists and comics. The instruction page was filled with wrinkled, hunched-over men and women sporting canes.

“Whereas it’s true that just a beard will put years on a cartoon figure, there are other characteristics which will help in the process. There are curvature of the spine tottering stance use of a cane, slumped sitting. Oldsters may be sprightly generally, pooped or palsied and shaky,” was the advice the cartooning book offered.

Seems like Trump fit the stereotype to a T.

Like everyone, September 11 is burned into my mind a quarter of a century later.

We all have our stories of that day. This is mine.

I still have my husband’s Long Island Rail Road ticket from September 11, 2001.

It was never punched.

Three days earlier, we had moved into a newly built house in Huntington, Long Island, from my beloved New York City.

 September 10, 2001. It was 25 years ago … the day before the world changed forever, and one in which my own world underwent a life-altering change of its own.

Moving had been a decision fraught with doubt, as I was an urban creature through and through. That day, still shell-shocked from the new reality of living in the suburbs, I comforted myself knowing that I would return to the city the next day, the 11th, to finish cleaning out my apartment on the Upper West Side.

September 11th would be my husband Hersh’s first day of commuting to his office in downtown New York. My plan that morning was to take a late morning train and meet at his office at the end of the day. Stumbling around a collection of floor-to-ceiling boxes, my normal morning routine of listening to The Today Show was decidedly off-kilter. Without cable set up yet, my TV reception was limited. But I had no inkling how very off-kilter it would truly be.

When I heard Katie Couric announce the first report of the North Tower of the World Trade Center being hit by a plane, my initial assumption was that it was likely a small private plane and was an accident.

I could not contemplate the unthinkable.

Still, I wondered if the city subways might experience delays because of this incident and maybe not the ideal time for me to go into the city.

The Unthinkable

The view from Franklin and West Broadway

When Hersh stepped out of the subway at Franklin and West Broadway on his way to his office, blocks from the World Trade Center he called me to discuss the feasibility of me coming into town due to the concerning incident at the WTC.

It was 9:01am.

We never had a chance to continue the conversation because, while on the phone, a second plane hit the South Tower, and Hersh watched in disbelief as a giant fireball exploded. I listened to the crackling, and then our call was abruptly ended.

My heart was in my stomach. I knew it was no accident and that America was under attack.

Suddenly my beloved city was under attack, and I was not there. It was unbearable.

Without social media to get second-by-second news updates and limited TV, I was really in the dark, in the dark of the suburbs. Stuck in the unfamiliar suburbs by myself, boxed in my hundreds of cartons, worried about city friends, and not knowing how Hersh could get home, let alone when, was nerve-wracking.

The city shut down, suspending all transportation in and out of the city.

Eventually, Hersh joined the throngs of confused and frightened souls slowly walking uptown. By evening, limited commuter train service returned. I was fortunate to welcome him back home that evening, his suit bearing the dust and ashes that permeated the skies of New York City.

A privilege far too many would not have.

We would lean a few days later, that the husband of the couple who were to buy our apartment had perished that day in the Towers.

He never wore that suit again, and we never had it cleaned. It remains hanging in a closet as a reminder. The dust of that tragedy remains embedded in the suit.

The unused ticket remains unpunched.

And my heart remains broken, a quarter of a century on.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2026. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.