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• A Capital Hill Police Officer, she made headlines with fellow officer, David Bailey, when they responded to sniper fire directed toward members of Congress that were at a baseball field. Griner though struck in the ankle by the shooter, still managed to respond to the threat saving many, including Senator Steven Scalise, who is noted for being staunchly opposed to gay marriage. Griner, who is married to a woman, demonstrated in no uncertain terms that people in the LGBT communities are just as capable of serving in any capacity.

• The author and creator of the Harry Potter books and movies, she has been called the first person to become a billionaire by selling books. In reading her biography I noted how, despite the changes to ones circumstance that naturally come with instant wealth and fame, that she had changed very little as a person. She did not identify with the wealthy 1%, and did not look down on those who less well off. And in her twitter exchanges with Mr. Trump I rather appreciated her statement:

“When a man this ignorant & easy to manipulate gets within sniffing distance of the nuclear codes, it's everyone's business.”   - J.K. Rowling

• When Colin Kaepernick decided to take a knee on August 14th, 2016, when the National Anthem played at the beginning of a football game, he did so in protest against the killing of unarmed black men by police. 

• It was soon after the BLM movement got started, we began to see detractors saying All Lives Matter, and Blue Lives Matter, the latter referring to Police officers. But those sayings do not sit well with the intent that birthed the BLM movement. 

• If a poor man says, “I suffer”, we can all agree that he does and sympathize, or pity him. But if in response to the poor man's plea we hear a rich man say, “Hey, I suffer too!”, we are righteously disgusted at this response to the poor man's complaint, and we understand that it is an attempt to steal the poor man's thunder.

I honor Mr. Kaepernick's struggle to bring attention to police excessive use of force against people of color.  

• Edward Snowden is an American who was a contracted government employee who worked with the CIA and NSA as a programmer. He became known to the world when he copied classified information and then released this information to the Media, even as he made his escape to Russia via China. He did all of this because of concerns he had about the legality, legitimacy, and goals of the various programs he discovered our government was running. 

• We often extoll the virtues of service men and women who carry out their orders despite great personal risk because they were ordered to do so, and we honor their dedication to duty. And we deplore the excuses made by war criminals whose only excuse for committing war crimes was that they were ordered to. But here we have a man whose only guide about what was right or wrong was his own conscience, and at great personal risk, and the loss of everything he owned and knew, he decided that he had to act for the benefit of our country on a moral and ethical basis.

• Born Bradley Edward Manning, now Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, she is a former U.S. Army soldier found guilty of espionage and aiding or providing comfort to the enemy. She was the whistle-blower who leaked military information to Wikileaks that showed what many called American war crimes. Despite the fact that her actions were motivated by a sense of morality and duty to one’s fellow human beings, she was convicted by court martial. 

• The WikiLeaks Baghdad airstrike video "Collateral Murder" put Wikileaks on the map. Two American helicopters were seen firing on a group of 10 men. Two Reuters employees were there and were killed. The pilots apparently mistook their cameras for guns. The helicopters also fired on a van that had stopped to help wounded people on the ground. Two children in the van were wounded, and their father was killed. 

• One month before Julian Assange was arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy, Manning was jailed for refusing to testify before a grand jury. She did not testify.

• Susan Sarandon in addition to being an Academy Award-winning actress has had a long career as a political activist. A partial list of her activities must include: her participation as a 1983 delegate to Nicaragua sponsored by MADRE, an organization that promotes social, environmental, and economic justice; in 1999 she was appointed by UNICEF as a Goodwill Ambassador; in 2006 she was one of eight women selected to carry in the Olympic flag at the Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Turin Italy.

• Her actions, which have earned her assignment as our Queen of Cups was her outspoken stance against then Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In an interview with The Guardian published on November 26th, 2017, Sarandon said about Hillary Clinton:

"I did think she was very, very dangerous.”