We’re emerging from our second winter of COVID cocoonery with our collective happiness riding on what We the People do next. Do we fold and fade under the stress of multiple, unprecedented system failures? Or — COVID-hardened and resilient — do we repair our failing civic, energy and climate systems? A lot of mischief slipped […]
Hello?
Hello?: What’s our national civic culture?
It’s fair to ask why a country with as much promise as ours seems unable to capitalize on its extraordinary strengths to solve existential threats. We don’t lack means to combat pandemics, climate destabilization, social injustice or seditious attempts to overthrow government. We lack the will. How did we come to set this table? Let’s […]
Hello? Let’s not opt for the common bad
There’s a telling word we Americans like to use to identify ourselves: “taxpayer.” When we complain about our government, taxpayer — not citizen — is the term we typically invoke to legitimize our concerns. “Citizen” isn’t a word that leaps nearly so readily off the American tongue as taxpayer. In fact, citizen seems a word […]
Hello? The definition of insanity
That irritating Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, a sharp critic of empty posturing on climate change, aptly summed up the recent Glasgow COP26 international climate crisis confab: “Blah, blah, blah.” The elephant in Glasgow labored mightily — and brought forth a mouse. Once again. Thunberg and her cohorts — 100,000 of whom reportedly showed up to […]
Hello? Heading for infamy
“The existential threat to humanity is climate change.” — President Joe Biden, Oct. 21, 2021 We’re asking the wrong question about Joe Manchin III, the Democratic senator from West Virginia. Getting the nation’s electricity grid off Earth-warming fossil fuel feedstock was the critical centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s ambitious effort to cope with climate change […]
Hello? A wretched triumph of American ‘exceptionalism’
“Folks are supposed to have common sense. But it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks … It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.” — Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, July 23. Hey, vaccine refusers. Listen up. People are losing patience with your lame excuses for failing to get vaccinated against COVID-19. This […]
Hello? Fighting for a livable Earth
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.” — Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Aug. 3, 2021. This spring’s Liberty Bell High School graduates are in the first cohort of young homo sapiens in history to get a genuinely long-term weather forecast. Regrettably, it promises 30 years of ruinous climate. […]
Hello? — A troubling portrayal of the Methow
The Methow Valley is a deeply divided community where wealthy urbanites “blind” to their privilege “hoard” their social capital while impoverished, excluded, resentful rural old-timers struggle to survive. This is the disturbing thesis of a new book, “Dividing Paradise; Rural Inequality and the Diminishing American Dream,” authored by Washington State University associate professor of sociology […]
Hello? We’re stress-testing our tourism infrastructure
In Winthrop, the pandemic has been good for business. Yet some town merchants say they and the town were woefully unprepared to handle the size and behavior of the crowds. Winthrop’s joined the big leagues, becoming yet another tourist town struggling to keep tourism from shredding the cultural fabric and degrading the livability of the […]
Hello? Canceling Liz Cheney
U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney is living proof that even stopped clocks are right twice a day. Though she’s in error about many things, about Donald Trump’s danger to democracy Cheney actually is correct 24 hours a day. Give her the thanks she deserves. Cheney’s the only Republican leader — now fired — in Congress with […]
