It is amazing to me how busy I manage to stay even though I am supposedly retired.  I do maintain a small CPA practice and I work part-time during tax season for the best self-prepared tax software company in the United States.  But, the 2018 tax season is over, and I find my days still seem rather hectic.  So, as a result, I haven’t been blogging.  Today, however, I have been glued to my television watching this historic summit taking place.  Both our President and Kim Jong Un have just met at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island in Singapore.

I never thought about Singapore as a travel destination but watching today I have learned so much about this sovereign city-state and island country in Southeast Asia.  It lies one degree north of the equator, at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula.  Singapore ranks seventh in the world for GDP per capita (the US is ranked 20^th).  In 2017, they were ranked second on the world’s safest cities list, coming in just behind Tokyo.  Singapore has a land area of just 250 square miles which makes it bigger than Manhattan but smaller than the five boroughs of New York City.  There are five official languages, and the dominant one is English!  Besides that, the pictures being shown on television show Singapore as a modern, beautiful city.

Several years ago, I traveled to Korea and, while there, did go to the DMZ.  I walked through a tunnel (up to the barrier that was North Korea), saw guards armed with machine guns and the razor wire separating the north from the south.

So, back to the summit, with such a noble goal of completely denuclearizing North Korea, at least North Korea has shown some good will by releasing some hostages, stopping its nuclear tests, and it appears they have destroyed the tunnels as well as some of the buildings at one of its nuclear test sites.  So far, the United States hasn’t given up anything.  Whatever happens, I trust that President Trump will know if he needs to walk away or whether talks will continue.

The sad thing is seeing some of the mainstream media and liberal elites rooting for this summit to be a failure.  Bill Maher, who fancies himself a comedian, said the other day “I hope there’s another recession, so we can get rid of Trump.”  What kind of American advocates for failure?  Why would anyone be against the possibility of peace?

I, like most people, am sure that the United States will not be getting everything we want today, and we may never get everything we want but I also realize this is a process and an important conversation has begun.  The whole world should be applauding the effort and rooting for success.